Spare parts portal.
A portal where your customers order parts from their own machine: installed base, exploded views, customer-specific pricing and punchout. Built on Magento 2.
Your customers call for parts. Some of that revenue never reaches you.
A technician is standing next to a machine that has stopped. He knows the serial number, not the part number. So a photo goes off to service@, and then it starts: emails back and forth, someone at the service desk digging through the ERP, a quote, an approval, an order typed over by hand. Two days later the part arrives — if it is the right part.
Meanwhile a local supplier can deliver that same bearing set tomorrow. In capital equipment, that is how a substantial share of parts revenue leaks away to third parties. And parts revenue is usually the highest-margin business you have.
A spare parts portal does not solve that by bolting a webshop onto your site. It solves it by letting your customer start from the one thing he knows for certain: his own machine.
Why a webshop does not work here
A webshop assumes a visitor who knows what he is looking for. He types in a product name, filters on colour and size, and checks out. Your customer knows which machine has stopped, which line it sits in and how long it has been making that noise. Beyond that he knows nothing — and he does not need to, because you built that machine.
So the difference is not in the order button, it is in everything before it: which machines does this customer own, in which configuration, which parts actually fit them, and what do they cost for him. That is a data question rather than a catalogue question, and it is exactly where off-the-shelf packages break down.
There is a second effect people rarely plan for: your installed base runs in other time zones. Every order that comes in from Australia on a Sunday evening is an order that would otherwise have been placed on Monday — or not at all.
Installed base
Every customer sees their own machines: serial number, year, configuration and the options they were shipped with. Parts are shown for that machine, not for your entire catalogue. Less searching, and far fewer wrong orders.
Part selection
Exploded views, machine configuration or serial number as the entry point. Clicking on the drawing instead of searching for a part number the technician does not have to hand anyway.
Customer-specific pricing
Contract prices, volume tiers and discount agreements per customer, live from your ERP. What the customer sees in the portal is what lands on the invoice — otherwise they will call you anyway.
Punchout (OCI / cXML)
Larger customers buy through SAP Ariba, Coupa or a system of their own. A punchout integration lets them order in your portal without bypassing their own procurement process.
What we build it on
Only now does this become a technology story. We build portals on Magento 2 and Mage-OS, with a Hyvä frontend and an ERP integration written around your processes. Not because Magento looks good on a slide, but because everything above — installed base, serial number logic, per-customer pricing, punchout — has to be genuinely buildable without hitting the ceiling of a platform.
Which ERP you run matters less than you would think. Isah, Ridder IQ, Infor LN, AFAS, Exact, Dynamics BC — the integration is always custom, because your item structure and pricing logic are custom too. What does matter: your ERP stays the source of truth, and the portal does not quietly become a second administration that drifts out of sync.
When you do not need us
If what you want is a portal where customers can log in, download a PDF catalogue and type in a list of part numbers, there is an off-the-shelf package that will do that faster and cheaper than we will. Genuinely. Call us once the question gets harder than that.
We come in on the difficult part: parts that differ per serial number, machines carrying thirty years of revisions, configuration logic, pricing agreements that do not fit a simple volume tier, and integrations with customer procurement systems that never work the same way twice.
What we need from you
Honestly: the portal is roughly 40% of the effort. The rest is data work on your side, and companies almost always underestimate it. At machine builders the item data is rarely portal-ready — not because anyone did a bad job, but because for thirty years nobody needed it to be.
We would rather say that up front than halfway through. A project that stalls on data work costs you money and costs us a lukewarm reference. So we do not start by building, we start by looking at what you have.
The first step is measuring, not building
We start with a readiness scan: a scoped engagement of a few weeks in which we go through your parts data, installed base, ERP interface, pricing structures and catalogue quality. You get an implementation plan with a business case underneath it, and you know where it is going to hurt before a single line of code is written.
A baseline measurement is part of that, and it matters more than it sounds. Without a baseline you cannot demonstrate a year from now what the portal actually delivered. We look at what your parts process costs you today: how many requests needed more than two rounds of email, how many returns are booked as "wrong item", how often a second shipment went to the same machine within ten working days. Those numbers are already in your systems — nobody has ever put them side by side.
Whoever does the scan knows afterwards whether this project is a sensible one. Including when the answer is no.
