Time is money, and the catalog group at Totaline, the replacement components division of world-leading HVAC manufacturer Carrier, intends to save a lot of both. They’ll accomplish it by doing away with their manual paper-based catalog production process and replacing it with a database-driven system that, among other things, will generate formatted catalog pages for them.

The change came about when a sales rep from Totaline happened to pick up a Catalog Builder flyer at a recent trade show. Little did he realize the impact that small act would have on business and the day-to-day lives of his co-workers in marketing, customer service, and even product management. Wendi Evans, the person who works most closely with Totaline’s 1,200 page catalog, doesn’t hesitate to assert that Catalog Builder is going to make life a lot easier for a lot of people.

What the sales rep had found, and passed along to Evans, was a brochure describing how Catalog Builder software creates an electronic repository of product data and formats it for use in print, PDF, and interactive CD-ROM and web-based catalogs.

It sounded very attractive to Evans who explained, “We had been producing our catalogs manually, relying on paper, pen, and graphic designers.” That’s a big task when you’re dealing with Totaline’s 25,000 SKUs.

As a matter of fact, due to the manual production process and lack of digital content, the catalog group typically spent five to six months of every year pulling together the annual Totaline catalog. As with most traditional print catalogs, by the time Totaline published the catalog, much of its content was already out of date. To get the right information, reps and distributors often needed to call Customer Service, who in turn spent much time fielding calls and investigating inquiries.

Evans saw Catalog Builder as an opportunity to change all that: to make the catalog work harder and at the same time reduce the amount of work that has to go into producing it.

But first, she checked out the options. “I talked to five or six vendors with products similar to Catalog Builder,” explained the marketing specialist, “but none of them could match the level of HVAC industry experience of Computer Pundits.”

Computer Pundits Corporation is the developer of Catalog Builder. The company has specialized in supplying catalog software and services to the HVAC market for a number of years. In that time Computer Pundits has amassed the largest HVAC industry parts database available. It includes fully attributed data and images from over 220 manufacturers. Catalog Builder customers can use that data to build their own catalog content database, or they can outsource the content development task to Computer Pundits.

The idea of a turnkey catalog solution appealed to the catalog group at Totaline. “We like the fact that Computer Pundits can build our database and set up our catalog quickly, then turn it over to us for updating and creating catalogs going forward,” explained Evans.

Plans for their new catalog system include using Catalog Builder to generate niche catalogs for specific customers or sales purposes and an online version of the catalog for interactive searches. They’ll still need to have catalogs printed of course, but since Catalog Builder automates formatting with template-driven designs, they’ll be able to send their catalog straight to the printer, saving the thousands of dollars they used to spend on graphic design fees.

Product management can update parts information and pricing in the catalog database on the fly, and “the fact that we can go directly from our database to print or to CD or whatever, means that our catalogs will be more up to date and therefore more useful to the distributors and dealers in the field,” states Evans. That’s significant considering that the catalog is an important reference tool for dealers, distributors, and customers throughout the Totaline network of almost 700 locations around the globe.

Also in the works are plans to use Catalog Builder to feed generic and aftermarket parts data into the Electronic Parts Information Catalog (EPIC) on Totaline’s web portal. The portal, hvacpartners.com, is designed to be a single source of information on parts and supplies for all Carrier systems. When completed, distributors will be able to download Totaline parts data from the portal and merge it into their own catalogs.

“The people in charge of the portal intended to get the parts data into EPIC one way or another,” explained Evans. “Having our parts and supplies data in the Catalog Builder system will give us the power to do that and so much more.”