Pedler: Catalog Chaos: How the aftermarket went digital (and nearly imploded)

In the beginning, there was paper. Anyone who needed an aftermarket auto part before the 1980s would show up at or call (from a corded phone) an auto parts store and tell a professional counterperson what they were looking for. Seventy-five percent of the real estate on a parts counter was taken up by large catalog racks, full of dozens of paper catalogs, one for each supplier.

Paper catalogs contained a wealth of information, and they were the backbone of the aftermarket for decades. The best ones opened with technical information, followed by vehicle fitment information, and ended with technical specifications, measurements, line drawings, interchanges, and the holy grail of parts catalogs—grainy black and white images of each part. Pricing came separately on separate color-coded pages.

Parts manufacturers sent new catalogs every year or so. (Our deepest apologies to trees.) In between catalog distributions, manufacturers would send supplements that contained carry-up coverage and revisions for mistakes in the catalog. Despite their inefficiencies, paper catalogs were beloved and served us faithfully for decades.

Customers were not expected to look up or source their own parts or do their own research, because these processes were so esoteric and complicated that they required a counterperson's unique skill set. The skill set: 45% mechanic, 30% multitasking, 2% customer service and 18% smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. The remaining 5% could be used for chatting with regular customers or yelling at parts delivery drivers.

In the 1980s, when it became cost-effective, computer systems handled inventory, pricing, customer data, and point-of-sale activities. And then came the rise of the electronic catalog (ecat). Ecats were groundbreaking technology, but the earliest ecats lacked the charm and charisma of a paper catalog.

Early Electronic Catalogs: A Play In One Act

Place: An independent jobber somewhere in the USA.

Counterperson: I need an alternator for a 1980 Toyota Celica.

Ecat: I don't know why you're coming to me with this. How about a nice air filter?

Counterperson: I really need an alternator.

Ecat: I'm not optimistic, but let's give it a shot.

Counterperson: It has a 2.2-liter engine.

Ecat: Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Slow your roll. We barely know each other. I need some time and space to think this over.

Later…

Ecat: Here is an assortment of alternators that might fit a 1980 Toyota Celica. You're welcome.

Counterperson: How do I know which one to choose?

Ecat: I am not a wizard.

Counterperson: Do you have some images or specs or an interchange, so I can make a comparison?

Ecat: What are these words? Images? Specs? Interchange? You should know I only speak English.

Counterperson: Can you at least narrow it down to three alternators?

Ecat: I could, but I don't want to deprive you of this critical learning moment.

Counterperson: I'll just take three of them and hope one fits. Then I'll return the other two.

Ecat: There is absolutely no reason for us to continue this dialogue. My job here is done.

There were, and still are, two components to an ecat. One component is a manufacturer's catalog—this component says "this part fits this car"—and the second component is a vehicle table. A vehicle table consists of normalized standardized terminology and attributes for all vehicles manufactured for sale in a particular country, beginning with the United States. A vehicle table says, "Let's all agree that the Toyota Celica manufactured in 1980 came in three different submodels and two different engines."

Then the manufacturer's catalog and the vehicle table dated for a while and eventually got married. I shouldn't, but I'll take this analogy to its logical conclusion: a digital file was born that contained the manufacturer's catalog in the standard set forth by the ecat and the vehicle table. That digital file was loaded into an ecat, and counterpeople could now look up parts using a computer.

One of the first companies to bring this technology to market was Triad. (Fast-forward four decades, and you may know them as Epicor.) Triad soon had competition in the form of CCI, Profit Pro, Wrenchead, and others. Even some retailers developed their own ecat technology. But this burgeoning and competitive industry had created a big problem.

Every ecat and at least one retailer had created their own vehicle table and their own format for the delivery of a manufacturer's digital file, and none of them matched. Every manufacturer's catalog was now married to multiple different ecats. Multiple digital files were added to the family. There was no easy way to convert one file format to another. Nothing was standardized or efficient. File quality varied wildly. Profitability was threatened.

The process of converting a manufacturer's catalog to another format is called data mapping, and it was expensive. Now, manufacturers were being asked by their trading partners to have their catalogs mapped to different formats. Once that was done, all those files needed to be updated. The dreams of better data quality, greater efficiency at the parts counter, and faster time to market for parts were collapsing. The process was frustrating and expensive, and not serving anyone well. Before this new technology would become ubiquitous and revolutionize the industry, a great many competing stakeholders would need to agree on a better way.

Paper wasn't coming back, but what began as a technology breakthrough had turned into chaos—multiple formats, poor data quality, endless and expensive updates. We had solved some problems and created a bunch of new ones. But out of this chaos came a rare, extraordinary, and historical moment. The entire aftermarket did something against its nature: it collaborated and cooperated to design a radical new solution. How could an industry with a reputation for independence and unruliness agree on anything, let alone a new architecture for selling auto parts? That's the subject of next month's article.