Digital Spare Parts List

How to repair in your community Digital tools and workflows for repair groups
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Hello everyone,

I’m new here — based in southern Germany. I’ve been building a small web app in my spare time and would like to contribute it to this community, if it turns out to be useful to anyone besides me.

It’s called OpenParts (https://openparts.de). In short: a digital spare parts list that you fill in yourself as you work. You add the parts you’ve identified, note where each one can be ordered, and end up with a single list for the whole repair rather than notes scattered across a phone, a notebook and someone’s memory.

This isn’t a business and I’m not looking to make money from it — it’s free, there’s no advertising, and it started simply because I wanted the thing to exist.

It’s most useful when a repair gets complicated — several parts, several suppliers, more than one session, more than one person involved. Because the list lives at a link, it can be handed to whoever does the ordering, picked up again at the next session, or worked on by two people who aren’t in the same room. That’s really the point of it: making it easier to work on a repair together. No account needed.

Here’s an example list rather than a description:

https://openparts.de/en/cart/be2b77b7a042ca7c97e5bb12a7c8e160

(The English version is very fresh, so please read past any rough edges.)

I’d be glad to hear whether this matches how you actually work. In particular: when a part has to be ordered after a session, how do you currently keep track of it — and does it ever happen that the same part gets looked up twice because the first result went missing? If that simply isn’t a problem in your group, that’s useful for me to know too.

Thanks,
Phil

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Thanks for sharing @Philipp !

Currently if a spare part is needed for a repair at one of our events, we tend to research it with the visitor, send them away with a recommendation, and record that the item needs to come back with a part in order to be fixed next time. The responsibility is with them to source the part and bring it next term. In terms of our records, that sheet goes into our ‘Pending’ list.

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Thanks, that’s really useful — especially the detail that you research the part together with the visitor. I’d pictured it as something done afterwards, so that changes how I think about it.

The sheet you mentioned is what interests me most. Would you be willing to share what it looks like — which fields are on it, and whether it’s something your group made or a standard form? I’d like to understand what you already capture before assuming anything needs replacing. If it turns out a list like mine could just slot into that workflow rather than sit beside it, that would be a much better outcome.

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