Free-Cat is a cool service that I stumbled upon a few months back in the automotive aftermarket industry. Free-Cat is a free on-line parts catalog service used by repair shops and parts retailers. It was created by a group of aftermarket parts suppliers which were frustrated with the traditional catalog services offered by commercial providers. Affinia, Bosch, Cardone, Dayco, Federal Mogul, Gates, Standard Motor Products and Tenneco were among the founding companies.
Free-Cat's advantage versus other data synchronization strategies and parts catalog services is the quality and timeliness of the data. Free-Cat's repository is updated directly by the actual parts manufacturers. In other words, no jobbers, warehouses or third party catalog services are involved. The result is that there is less opportunity for error. Furthermore the original parts suppliers can control the timeliness of the update. There is no latency created by information delays moving through the supply chain. More information on the value proposition can be found on the Free-Cat web site.
Not only is the site free, but there is no registration required. So you can go on-line to look-up the part number for the spark plugs in your current vehicle. The one thing the Free-Cat site does not explain was how parts suppliers can upload parts catalogs into the centralized repository. I am assuming that suppliers can use B2B e-Commerce technologies for publishing rather than manual data entry.
I continue to be impressed by the number and variety of data synchronization and product catalog systems that exist throughout various industry verticals. I had been of the opinion that PIES was the primary standard used in the automotive aftermarket. Needless to say, Free-Cat has changed my perspective considerably…
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