Digital Cataloging Gives Wholesale Distributor's Customers Continuous Access to Up-to-Date Pricing

Ace Supply Company, Inc., a Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) wholesale distributor of Eagan, Minnesota, likes to be ahead of the pack and efficient in everything it does. The production of its product catalog is no exception.

Seeking an efficient catalog system
For years, Ace Supply produced its own catalog in-house using a word processing application. It was a laborious process, and new catalogs were printed only once every couple of years. When they began looking for a cost-effective way to improve the efficiency of their catalog process, they determined that outsourcing was not the answer.

Sorting the options
"There are many companies that offer catalog development for people, but they are costly and you are constrained to that third party to compile your information into their catalog format," stated Greg Vogel, Ace Supply Technical and Information Services Manager. "Oftentimes they require you to provide all the materials and data you would like to have compiled. With that in mind, we figured that if we had to provide the data and information, we might as well find something that will let us compile it ourselves, and display it in the mediums we wanted."

What they found was Catalog Builder software from Computer Pundits Corporation. They've been using it for nearly five years now, which puts them far ahead of the pack when it comes to modern catalog design and distribution.

Keeping pricing fresh
Catalog Builder is the uniquely affordable digital cataloging software for building, designing, and maintaining print, CD-ROM, PDF, e-mail, and e-commerce catalogs in-house. Using Catalog Builder, Ace Supply outputs the pricing pages that are inserted into the sales department's three-ring binder catalogs. They also generate their own searchable digital catalogs (with hyperlinked Table of Contents) that customers can access 24X7 on the Ace Supply website or browse on CD.

"The number one benefit to us has been that when list prices change, I can update Catalog Builder and simply generate new catalogs on demand," explains Vogel.

In the near future, Ace Supply will go even beyond providing up-to-date list pricing in its catalogs. They'll take advantage of Catalog Builder's browser and shopping cart features to implement e-commerce, providing customers with convenient access to current product pricing based upon their own specific discount schedules.

It's capabilities like these that have convinced Vogel that Catalog Builder can't be beat. "I haven't seen anything comparable to Catalog Builder that lets you be in control of your catalog real-time. Through discussions with others in the industry, I see they're still faced with the old-fashioned compilers who want to produce large quantities of catalogs at a time. That simply doesn't accommodate for changing pricing," concluded Vogel.

Computer Pundits Corporation is revolutionizing the business to business cataloging industry and saving companies around the world thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars.