ON THE CUTTING EDGE
It’s a tossup as to which is more irritating for a professional groundskeeper: Having a broken piece of equipment or having a dealer flip through a seemingly endless series of binders in search of a part that might be the right part, and a product number that might be the right product number.
While Encore Manufacturing Co. of Beatrice, NE can’t stop people from running over rocks with their lawn mowers, it can help on the back end. The company is making its products and parts catalog available on CD-ROM through PartSmart, an electronic catalog system generated by ARI Network Services Inc. in Milwaukee.
The electronic catalog will not take the place of the 3,700 or so catalogs Encore sends out to its 600 affiliated dealers. Plans are to phase in the new service while continuing to publish the paper-filled binders, especially since there will be dealers that choose not to sign up for the service.
Encore is leaving the job of selling the service to dealers to ARI, which charges a fee from the dealers to be connected. While no timetable has been set, Encore hopes to reduce its mailings, and future plans call for dealers to go straight from the CD-ROM catalog to an online order-processing system.
The catalog’s electronic version offers more than just a convenient means of indexing parts. Repair shops can see “exploded” graphic views of a lawn mower, with the exact location of the part in question highlighted. If the part is used in several sections of the mower, the electronic catalog shows where all the parts are located, allowing a dealer to check them – and potentially repair or replace them if they show wear.
The exploded view will also allow mechanics at the dealerships to provide better overall maintenance. Rather than taking apart a mower and trying to figure out where a specific gasket belongs, cross-indexing the part number will allow technicians to quickly place it – and get the mower back into operation.
“ARI has made it very user-friendly,” says Encore Manufacturing founder and owner W.H. “Dick” Tegtmeier, who characterizes the dealerships his company works with as ranging from “very sophisticated…to mom and pop shops where the guy was a good mechanic, and now he owns a computer.”
