“It’s incredible to think that anyone can access our entire stock range and order what they need without leaving their customer’s site. PartsArena will allow us to make our customer’s lives simple and more productive.”

Grant Richardson, Brand Director for  Parts Center

Company Overview

Wolseley UK is part of Wolseley PLC, the world's number one distributor of heating and plumbing products and is a leading supplier of builders' products to the professional market. The company is split into a range of specialist divisions, including Plumb Center, Build Center and Parts Center. Infomill will be working directly with Parts Center – Europe's largest specialist supplier of spare parts. Parts Center supplies spare parts for all forms of heating and ventilation appliances – including 26,000 ex-stock lines.
Business Challenge

Parts Center is the number one supplier of parts for gas engineers in the UK. In order to stay there, the business is always looking to make customers’ lives easier. The best way to do that is to make their enormous range of parts available to customers as an up-to-date catalogue.

Because Parts Center’s customers are predominantly gas engineers, working in the field, they do not always have easy access to a PC. The need to identify and order parts rapidly is paramount for these engineers – and mistakes must be avoided at all costs.

Why Parts Center Chose PartsArena

Parts Center was looking for a single solution that could publish their catalogue over a range of media. Infomill’s PartsArena was the only available product that met all of their requirements.

Parts Center needed to be able to publish its catalogue to Pocket PCs – a speciality of the PartsArena solution. However, it still needed to publish to the web for standard PC users. PartsArena allowed the same dataset to be used across both platforms, meaning that any updates only need to be made once.

What The Solution Achieves

The Parts Center catalogue is vast and constantly expanding. A practical way had to be found to be able to keep users up-to-date with the latest range. PartsArena’s “On Demand” functionality means that users access the catalogue directly whenever they need to, and only download the information that they need. This means that the process is fast and simple, without needing to manually update the information.

Users download exploded parts diagrams for the wide arrange of appliances supported. These diagrams link directly to associated parts lists via hyperlinked hotspots on the screen – providing users with correct Wolseley part numbers for ordering. Alternatively they can search for information using Infomill’s unique kNAV search functionality.

Once engineers have identified the right part for the job, they can then order it directly from Wolseley at the tap of a screen. They are able to specify whether they would like to be sent the part via next-day postage or pick it up from their nearest Parts Center – they can even check stock so that they know it will be ready when they get there.

Overall, PartsArena is designed with the user in mind. Not all heating engineers will be confident using Pocket PCs, but tests have shown that PartsArena can be mastered quickly by even the most devout technophobe.

“We want to make using Parts Center to be as simple as possible. PartsArena gives our customers the information they need and the confidence that when they collect the part, that it is in stock and ready for them.” Grant Richardson