THE proliferation of iPods, cellphones and other devices in the hands of smaller children is sure to have profound social significance in the long term, but in the short term it means something else: broken gadgets and lost parts.
Fortunately, technology is also improving on that front. Advances in business-to-business Internet transactions in the spare parts industry in recent years have helped make it easier for consumers to find replacement lids, chargers and remote controls, and for repair technicians to find obscure parts at a moment’s notice.
“We’re trying to take the repair industry, which revolves around very high-tech products, and build an infrastructure that’s as sophisticated as the products,” said Randy Whitehead, president of National Service Alliance, a network of independent consumer electronics repair specialists based in Salt Lake City.
This industry, Mr. Whitehead and other executives say, have struggled to keep pace with rapid changes in recent decades. Local repair services died out as products grew more reliable and their component parts were so expensive that it made little sense to stock them.
Big companies like Best Buy, Sears and others filled the void, sometimes relying on home-based, independent technicians for help. But the universe of component parts exploded in the meantime, and independent technicians were not equipped to find spare parts efficiently and coordinate the arrival of those parts with a service call.
A pair of innovations has helped change that. First, companies like National Service Alliance, ServicePower, ServiceBench and others built Internet-based services to help coordinate repair calls among independent repair technicians, making it easier for manufacturers and retailers to find technicians.
Second, there is Partsearch Technologies, a Manhattan-based company, started in 2001, that has compiled an online catalog of more than eight million spare parts for electronics, appliances and other items. It offers repair technicians and consumers a single place to find obscure parts and commonly lost items like batteries.
Mr Whitehead, of National Service Alliance, said that in past years, his company typically sent service technicians who made two or three trips to a customer’s house to repair an item — the first trip to diagnose the problem, followed by a repair visit after the technician had located the proper part.
In recent months, Mr. Whitehead’s company introduced phone-based diagnostic services and synchronized its systems with those of Partsearch, so the National Service Alliance could coordinate a repair visit with the arrival of parts.
The new system, Mr. Whitehead said, enabled National Service Alliance’s technicians to make single-visit repairs 70 percent of the time, double the previous rate. Labor costs associated with finding replacement parts, he added, have dropped by at least 25 percent.
Partsearch represents a classic Internet niche success story. A privately held company, it generated more than $60 million in 2007 sales.
Partsearch does not actually keep spare parts in a warehouse. Rather, it collects inventory information from suppliers and manufacturers in various industries, such as Ingram Micro or Whirlpool, and collects a commission or a transaction fee when they sell a part to a service company.
Partsearch also operates a Web site for consumers, Partstore.com, which sells the same merchandise, and it builds online part-searching services for Circuit City and other companies.
The items listed in Partsearch’s inventory cover about 90 percent of the available products in consumer electronics, computers, kitchen appliances and other household categories, according to Glenn Laumeister, the company’s chief executive.
The items most frequently broken or lost, he said, include laptop batteries, projection television lamps, refrigerator water filters and dryer timer knobs (so you’re not alone).
Mr Laumeister said his company is in the midst of a seasonal surge, as consumers break, lose or wear out their holiday gift gadgets. Also helping sales recently, he said, are environmentally aware customers looking to keep their older electronics items out of the dump. A precarious economy, of course, helps. “When the economy slows down, people fix their old stuff,” he said.
Alan Wolf, a senior editor at Twice magazine, a trade publication covering the consumer electronics industry, said Partsearch has “taken an enormous amount of time and money out of the repair process.”
“As technology gets more complex and consumers need more help with devices, there’ll be more and more demand for repair services,” Mr. Wolf added. “That’s especially true as the age of the average user gets lower and lower.”
Rick Souder, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Crutchfield, the consumer electronics retailer, agreed that the Web — and Partsearch, in particular — has made it easier for consumers to find spare parts.
Indeed, the company includes a link to Partstore.com on the Crutchfield site even though Crutchfield sells some of the same items.
Although technology has improved the operations of repair technicians, and made replacement parts widely available to consumers, other holes in the repair process persist, he said.
“I find I still need a tour guide when I try something on my own,” Mr. Souder said. “And if you want to take a piece of equipment down to the local repair guy, he either doesn’t exist anymore or he’s more difficult to find.”