Engineers turn up with the right part. Spares revenue up 30%.
A service portal, a spares lookup and Shopify-linked ordering for an industrial burner business, built on one set of parts data.
- Spares identified by phone call and spreadsheet
- Service records on paper
Context
Comtherm sells industrial burners and gas controls and services them in the field. That means three different jobs happening against the same data: engineers recording what they did on site, the office finding the right spare for a burner that has been in service for fifteen years and customers ordering parts without a conversation.
None of those were joined up. WYBB has been embedded with Comtherm since 2019, and the work has moved from marketing into building the systems the operation runs on.
The constraint
A burner that has been in the field for over a decade has a parts list that lives in a spreadsheet, a service history that lives in a filing cabinet and a spares catalogue that only two people can navigate. The same part appears under three names, depending on which list you are looking at.
Nothing here is solved by a better website. It needs the data straightened out and systems built on top of it that the people doing the work will actually use.
The approach
We built it in portals rather than as one system, so each group of users got something that fitted the way they work. Engineers on a phone in a boiler room need something different from the office looking up a valve.
Everything reads from the same parts data, and that data gets rebuilt from the master sheet whenever it changes, rather than being copied once and left to rot.
What we built
Engineer portal
Mobile-first service recording with per-engineer accounts and authentication.
Submission that holds and completes when signal comes back, because site visits happen in plant rooms.
Service and maintenance records held per burner, with the same fields available across burner types.
Spares lookup
A lookup tool built from the master parts and spares sheet, so the office and the trade counter search the same list.
Product titles enriched from Shopify export data, so variants of the same part are distinguishable rather than three identical rows.
Rebuilt from the master sheet when the sheet changes.
Shopify-linked ordering
Spares ordering connected to the store, so a part identified in the lookup can be bought without a second conversation.
Platform
Node, Express and Postgres behind the portals. Store moving to shop.comtherm.co.uk, with a content-led Astro and Sanity site on comtherm.co.uk for burners, heaters and technical content.
Acquisition
Ongoing advertising execution and Merchant Center hygiene.
Weekly Shopify product SEO as a standing discipline rather than a project.
Results
Engineers record service on a phone, the office finds the right spare from the same list the store sells from and spares revenue is up 30% year on year. The relationship has run since 2019 and is the longest WYBB has.
The personal relationship is a big part of why we continue to choose WYBB. They are always on hand, no matter the time of day, to offer advice or support. After several years together, our marketing, sales, and operations have consistently improved, as their high standards keep us focused and accountable.
Next steps
Deliver the two-domain rebuild and continue weekly optimisation. Implement a barcode scanning system for stock and purchasing.