The Internet is a partner with technology in propagating change

Consider that in 1965, Fotomat Corporation introduced the first overnight film processing service. In 1972, Polaroid introduced the SX-70, the first “pocket sized” instant camera. In 1995, the first digital cameras were introduced, and film processing rapidly started to disappear. By the late 1990’s the first cell phones with cameras began to appear. This year, 85 percent of all mobile phones sold have embedded cameras.

And the morning that I wrote this column I learned that the Chicago Sun-Times laid off its entire photography staff, in favor of using reporters, freelancers and reader-submitted images.

So, in the span of just over 40 years, we have gone from waiting a week to get prints of the pictures we took, to a major metropolitan daily newspaper firing its staff photographers in favor of others submitting their digital images. That’s a stunning change in a stunningly fast time. And like most changes in our lives these days, it is driven by technology.

But technology has a partner in propagating change: the Internet. As technological innovation occurs, the Internet brings it to millions of consumers almost instantaneously. As we are exposed to new and better technology, we assimilate it into our lives and it raises our collective expectations of what the new normal is. This cycle then repeats and exposure to and expectations of all things technology increases.

I make this point because I think some of us have a tendency to think that the aftermarket is somehow able to resist change, or perhaps more accurately, to think that change occurs more slowly in our space. That, I think, is a dangerous notion.

Consider that as recently as the late 1980’s, the majority of counter people looked up parts from printed pages bolted into long catalog racks. By the mid 1990’s we were staring at green screens with year/make/model lookups. Ten years later a majority of parts stores had Internet connections that enabled full graphic display of digital images. We are now moving to catalogs that are centrally located so they can be updated in real or near-real time.

Technology is not only producing change – it also is profoundly affecting the rate of change. Consider that paper catalogs and price sheets were the mainstay for about 80 years; green screens were prominent for about a decade; dumb terminals feeding from a "mainframe" fell into the timeline for about five years or so; and most recently we've all been using PC-based systems.

As diverse in nature and function as all of these approaches were, they had one thing in common. Each individual company relied on data that resided in its own system and was refreshed occasionally. Today we're seeing mass migration to centralized databases and software that enable the real-time changes that I mentioned above. Welcome to the "cloud." 

Through all – what has happened to the rest of our business? The demand for better and more replete data is going up, as are customer expectations. As technology and the Internet feed on each other our customers' appetites are continually sharpened.

We've come to the point where every aftermarket practitioner needs to frequently audit their technology for effectiveness against competitors and fulfillment of customer needs.  Ask yourself these questions:

• Is my catalog software resident on my system or is it in the cloud?

• Is my data being updated monthly via a mailed disc or a large batch transfer or is it updated frequently via web services?

• Do I think that web-based sellers of parts are “not in my business” or am I trying to figure out how I can get in that business?

• Is a significant amount of my installer business still done via phone or is it moving quickly to the Internet?

If you answered the first option for the preceding questions, you may have some catching up to do. If you answered the second option, good for you. You are keeping up.

In this new technology-enabled aftermarket the game is keep up, catch up or close up.

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