Spare parts management can take a lot valuable time from you and your team. This article will highlight some of the key features of Visiativ Spare Parts and show how it helps SOLIDWORKS users:

• Manage their spare parts catalogues
• Maintain consistency with CAD models
• Provide 24/7 access to end customers or resellers

Directly connected to SOLIDWORKS, Visiativ Spare Parts is a powerful platform that gives you the fastest way to create and update parts catalogues. In addition, it helps with the distribution of associated technical documents.

It helps you speed up compliance with machinery regulations and eases the burden on your customer service team by making your customers and resellers more self-sufficient in equipment maintenance.

Let’s look at two perspectives of Visiativ Spare Parts:

• The Customer Experience
• The Author Experience

The Customer Experience

From a customer’s perspective, they often struggle to access catalogues, correctly identify components and communicate their requirements to the vendor.

By providing an online portal to customers or resellers with Visiativ Spare Parts, you can ease the access to your product and part information, making it available 24/7 from any web browser on any device.

Once logged in, the user can browse the library or search the portal using part numbers or descriptions. The catalogue authors determine what the user sees, based on permissions for general products or customer-specific equipment.

Selecting a product shows its ballooned exploded view and additional technical drawings, plus its Bills of Materials (BOM). From there you can view the BOM as a list or with thumbnail images, with linked balloons and item numbers to help identify each component. Also, you can explore sub-assemblies in more detail, and use a breadcrumb trail to navigate back. If you need an offline version, you can download the product BOM as a PDF, complete with exploded views.

Finding documents is similarly easy, either directly using the search tool, or via a product’s Documentation page. The document can be viewed directly or downloaded.

Finally, once the component has been found, the customer can add it to a list and send it onto you for further processing by your Service department.

The Author Experience

From a catalogue author’s perspective, typical problems encountered with spare parts management are getting the correct information for components and product BOMs, along with technical documentation and images of the products, and managing who has access to the products.

Starting with getting the correct information for components and product BOMs, by using your SOLIDWORKS data and publishing it to Visiativ Spare Parts with Visiativ myCADtools, you can easily upload product BOMs, thumbnail images of components, and ballooned exploded views, with minimal effort while maximising the reuse of the source engineering data.

Once in Visiativ Spare Parts, the product data can be further enhanced by adding product documentation and additional technical drawings of components, hence providing a fuller set of product information for your customers.

An important aspect of managing a catalogue is who has access to what product. In Visiativ Spare Parts you add Customers (companies) and invite Accounts (users at the Customer) into you your portal. View permissions can be assigned to products through for customer-specific Equipment. Each supply of a product to a customer can be given a unique equipment number or ID.

Products and Equipment that are made visible in Visiativ Spare Parts are immediately available to customers.

Visiativ Spare Parts

This was a very brief overview of Visiativ Spare Parts. There are many additional features you can benefit from such as automated product descriptions using AI. The online documentation can found be here.

Visiativ Software are continually adding new and enhanced capabilities to Visiativ Spare Parts to further improve catalogue management and the customer experience.

Visiativ Spare Parts ensures full compliance with the European Machinery Regulation, coming into force in 2027. This regulation requires machine manufacturers to provide complete and accessible technical documentation for at least 10 years – or throughout the equipment’s lifetime – to guarantee safe use, maintenance, and repair.

The solution enables you to digitally share this documentation without time limits, including detailed drawings, operating instructions, and maintenance and repair guides specific to each machine, ensuring adherence to the new legal requirements.

How the European Machinery Regulation may affect the UK is outlined on the GOV.UK website under ‘Government response to the call for evidence on machinery safety legislation’ (Updated 25 February 2026).

Contact us to find out more and see how Visiativ Spare Parts can help you.