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August 25, 2004--Two months ago, Milwaukee Stove sent out its first printed catalog in about 8 years. Granted, their customers could log onto the wholesaler's website and get all the updated information they could ever need about product, pricing and availability. But, as Mat Wozniak, Milwaukee Stove network administrator pointed out, "the guy in the truck can't access that". They depend upon the print catalog as a hands-on tool for referencing, job estimating, and so on. It's a tool that Milwaukee Stove can now afford to supply more frequently, and in a more customized fashion. Headquartered in Milwaukee, WI, Milwaukee Stove is a wholesale distributor that caters to the commercial and retail HVAC contractor. They have over 100 employees and six locations throughout WI and IL servicing the Midwest. As in other instances where Milwaukee Stove put technology to work for them-like their state-of-the-art training facility, their e-commerce website, and their dealer-managed inventory system-they're now putting technology to work to provide their customers with more frequent, up-to-date product information. Cutting Catalog Costs
The technology making it possible is Catalog Builder: a catalog design and management software system from Minnesota-based Computer Pundits Corporation (CPC). Using Catalog Builder, Milwaukee Stove can produce professional-quality catalogs (with full color images, product details, and automatically generated index and Table of Contents) in-house. Their full-line catalog includes 5,600 products on 220 pages. They print 5000. When they outsourced their catalog the last time, they spent nearly $25,000. At today's prices that cost would be closer to six or seven dollars per catalog. Now with Catalog Builder, Wozniak says they spent about $2.50 per catalog - less than half what they would have spent to outsource. The cost savings makes it much more feasible for Milwaukee Stove to keep up-to-date catalogs in their customers' hands. Adapting to a changing business climate
There's another thing Milwaukee Stove can do now that they couldn't do when they were outsourcing catalog production: Catalog Builder makes it possible for them to generate targeted or customer-specific mini catalogs on the fly. "Now we can produce catalogs that are targeted to an individual customer just as easily as we can produce an entire catalog. We couldn't have done this before at any reasonable cost," explained Phil Resch, Milwaukee Stove System Administrator. This supports the wholesaler's ideal of one-on-one customer service. "Like in any industry, retail or wholesale, product is becoming available through so many avenues. We target the contractor. They've changed, so we have to change. The business is becoming more one-on-one oriented. We used to try to fit everyone to a general mold to meet their needs, but now we're more focused on being able to provide individualized information and services. The specialty catalog, whether in electronic or print media, is a valuable tool to do that." Setting up the catalog
Designing and generating the catalog for print was actually the last step in a three-phase process that began with the wholesaler's Marketing department defining the structure and product groupings for the new catalog. The second phase involved gathering the data and images. They didn't own any of the information or product images from their past catalogs-the outsourcer did. So they were starting from scratch. "While Catalog Builder made the process of entering the information and formatting it easy, getting the data was hard work," said Resch. They sent letters to vendors seeking sources of data and images. In return they received web addresses and CDs. They also supplemented content by scanning, taking pictures, or gathering information from other internet sources. The third phase-generating the actual catalog with Catalog builder-was by far the easiest step according to Phil Resch, Milwaukee Stove System Administrator. "Once we had all the data and pictures, it only took us a week to pull together the actual catalog, from what fields to display to grouping, layout, formatting and so on."
While in their case, Wozniak and Resch are technically-oriented, Catalog Builder is not a product that requires great technical skills. "It's user friendly and very easy to learn," states Wozniak. "The online training and the Help file are outstanding. Plus we appreciated the service we got from CPC. They made themselves available to assist in anything, even layout suggestions."
Looking forward
Now Milwaukee Stove's marketing department can update their catalog contents at any time. They can generate new catalogs, whether full-line or specialty, at any time. And they can choose any number of output formats including print, PDF, and browser-based CD-ROM and web catalogs, all from a single database. "It's flexible enough to do just about anything," says Resch. As a matter of fact, he recently took advantage of the software to barcode a section of their warehouse. Milwaukee Stove customers, who were greatly anticipating the new catalog, received it the first week of August. Plans are already in the works for the next edition.
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