Good news on Horizon for this dotcom

By ADAM GIFFORD

While the past year has been one of attrition for dotcoms, internet portals and all manner of online activity, a New Zealand-designed site which allows engineers to source spare parts has gone from strength to strength.

A year ago, Horizon Consultants received a capital boost of £400,000 ($1.33 million) from a group of European investors to expand its sparesfinder.com site into Europe and elsewhere.

The site was developed by former PriceWaterhouse consultants Steve Herstell and Brian Oxenham, who saw a way for firms to unlock the value of their spares inventory.

Mr Oxenham moved to London to set up the new headquarters for the company, renamed sparesFinder, while Mr Herstell stayed in New Zealand "for lifestyle reasons" and kept expanding the business here.

"It's been going well - the [British] Sunday Times has judged sparesfinder.com number 45 in the top 100 ecommerce sites in Europe," Mr Herstell said.

"We're in 73 countries, and we have more than 34 million spares listed. We're the world's biggest warehouse."

The ranking has come at a good time, as the company is now raising a further £3 million for expansion.

"It's a numbers game - the more bits we can list on the site, the more chance there is a client will get the part they need."

Mr Herstell said the money should not be hard to raise, particularly from the London base.

"We know we have a really good model which works. The reason we're successful is focus. We're a marketing organisation, and we understand how to do that. We don't own technology. We outsource the running of the site."

The site is run by PavTech, formerly Wave Internet, in Hamilton, although a node is being established in Europe.

sparesFinder.com charges companies an annual fee to subscribe to the service. It then downloads a piece of software which allows it to capture the data in their spares inventory or maintenance management system into a flat file, which is exported into sparesFinder.com's Informix database.

If engineers need a spare, they do a text search. This gives contact details for any matches, and the firms can then make their own arrangements.

Mr Herstell said that because it was a text search rather than a search by order number, sparesFinder was not getting bogged down in the cataloguing problems that were slowing other portals.

"We have a unique problem. If you go to a search engine like Google, it won't give you the same answer twice. We have 34 million items and we have to search everything."

Apart from the subscription, it was a free service. "That's because engineers usually swap spares with each other, so the accountants don't get involved."