A parts fiche is the manufacturer's exploded drawing of one assembly — a front brake, a cylinder head, a subframe — together with a numbered list of every component in that assembly. Each number printed on the drawing corresponds to a row in the list, and each row gives the OEM part number, the description, and how many of that part the assembly uses.
That pairing is the whole idea. A part is easy to point at and hard to name, so the drawing does the naming. A rider who can see that the bolt they need is item 14 on the clutch cover drawing does not have to describe it over the phone, and the parts person does not have to guess what "the small silver one next to the thing" means.
Where the word comes from
Fiche is short for microfiche: flat sheets of film holding rows of shrunken page images, read on a magnifying reader with a backlight. From the 1970s onward, vehicle manufacturers shipped their parts catalogs this way, because a parts department that sold twenty model years of components could not physically store twenty model years of printed parts books. A drawer of film replaced a wall of binders, and each sheet was still called a fiche.
Microfiche readers are gone from dealerships now. The word is not. It survived the move to discs, then to desktop catalog programs, then to web applications, because it kept naming the same thing the whole time: the drawing plus the numbered list.
Exploded diagrams and illustrated parts lists
Two other terms show up constantly and mean closely related things. An exploded parts diagram is the drawing itself: the assembly pulled apart along its axes so every component is visible and in the order it stacks together. An illustrated parts list (IPL) is the numbered list beside it. Manufacturers and catalog vendors also use electronic parts catalog (EPC) for the software that holds thousands of those pairs and lets someone search them.
The drawing carries information a photograph would not. Order of assembly, which washer sits against which face, which parts are sold only as a kit, and which fasteners are shared across several positions are all readable from an exploded view. That is why manufacturers still draw them rather than photographing a disassembled engine.
How dealers use a fiche at the counter
At a parts counter, the fiche is a production tool. A customer or a technician names a symptom or a vehicle and a rough area of the bike; the parts person opens the right model year, finds the assembly, reads the reference numbers off the drawing, and builds a picklist of part numbers. The picklist gets keyed into the dealer management system as a quote, a work order, or a purchase order.
Speed and accuracy are the measures that matter here. The interface is dense on purpose, and the person driving it is trained. A counter fiche tool never needs to explain itself, because nobody unfamiliar with it is ever allowed to touch it.
How riders use online fiche
An online parts fiche is the same content aimed at a completely different user. A rider with a broken bike opens a dealer's website at eleven at night, selects their brand, model year, and model, opens a diagram category, and looks for the part they can see in front of them on the bench. Nobody trained them, and there is no counter person to intercept the question.
That changes the requirements. The drawing has to load and stay legible on a phone. Numbers on the drawing have to be tappable, or at minimum linked to a list that is readable without pinching. Each row needs a price and some signal about availability. And the whole thing has to end in an order, because the alternative is a phone call the next morning that may never happen.
The same catalog, two different products
Counter fiche software optimizes for a trained user's throughput. Online fiche optimizes for an untrained user finishing alone. Both are legitimate; they are simply not interchangeable, which is why plenty of dealerships end up running one of each.
Supersessions: why part numbers move
Manufacturers replace part numbers constantly. A revised clutch basket, a new supplier, a consolidated fastener — the old number is retired and superseded by a new one, sometimes several times over a model's life. A fiche drawing printed in 2014 can therefore list numbers that no distributor will sell today.
Good catalog software resolves those chains, so that looking up the old number lands on the current, orderable part instead of a dead end. Software that does not resolve them quietly loses sales: the customer sees "not available" and assumes the dealer cannot supply it. The mechanics are covered in part supersessions explained.
Where online fiche lives today
- Manufacturer EPCs. Brand-run electronic parts catalogs, usually behind a dealer login, and normally the upstream source of the diagram data everyone else displays.
- Dealer website catalogs. A parts catalog section on a dealership site, often supplied by the same vendor that builds the site, so the fiche and the storefront ship together.
- Storefront-embedded fiche. The diagram, the parts list, and the add-to-cart action rendered inside a store the dealer already runs, so checkout, customer accounts, and order history stay in one place.
All three display comparable drawings. What differs is who owns the surrounding experience — which is really a question about where the order gets placed and who keeps the customer relationship. The failure mode to watch for in all three is a desktop-era catalog dropped onto a phone unchanged; that pattern is examined in why traditional catalogs fail on mobile.
If you are a dealer evaluating fiche software
Start from the bottleneck. If your parts counter is slow, a counter-side catalog is the fix. If your online parts revenue is flat and wrong-part returns are high, the fiche your customers touch is the one to change. We build the second kind: interactive fiche diagrams that run inside your own storefront, with numbered hotspots, linked parts lists, supersession handling, and add to cart. The rest of the platform around it is documented on the features page.