TradingBell Inc

Industry: Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC and Data Communication

The Customer

The customer is an independent distributor of Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC and Data Communication products since 1931 serving Minnesota, Wisconsin and South Dakota.

The Challenge

The customer has multiple store locations and publishes online and print catalog for each of their stores from the data center located at their headquarters. The customer was in need of a catalog solution to store all the product information in a central database and create custom and on-demand catalogs for each of their customers using the data and images stored in the central repository database.

Catalogs were created by store managers on the fly for customer's visiting their store locations using the data stored in their data center.

Industry: Arts & Crafts

The Customer

One of the nation’s largest distributors of arts and craft supplies located in New Jersey.

The Challenge

The customer is challenged with creating, managing and updating product information and producing their print catalogs on time with accurate data. Every year, it takes several months to identify, consolidate, and create the year’s catalog. Adding to this, the basic description and price for the year’s catalog was to be extracted from the AS 400 system.

Industry: HVAC/R    

The Customer

One of the largest wholesale distributor of HVAC/R equipments in the country. The customer stocks and sells over 25,000 products and parts, and has a 1100-page catalog which is used as the main marketing tool for the company.

The Challenge

The customer’s catalog was previously built in-house over several years using QuarkXpress software. In order to publish a  new catalog every year, the customer had to go through an elaborate and time consuming task of updating and adding new products to the catalog, remove the products that were discontinued, and also update the latest price and description in the static Quark pages. This process was highly time consuming and labor intensive. The customer also maintained pricing information for all the products in an AS400 system but did not have other information about the products in the database.

As the business was growing fast and more companies were acquired, the customer realized that it was becoming impossible for its staff to keep track of all the information in the static Quark pages and that it will take at least 6 months to get its primary catalog published. The customer also wanted to take its product information online through its website to its customers with the ability to order products online.

The customer realized that they were in need of a central database to store all the product information. The customer also needed tools to get the data published to print and online media quickly and effectively, and also to publish print catalogs every year with minimal effort.

Industry: Aftermarket Auto Parts

The Customer

One of the leading manufacturer and distributor of after market auto parts located in Orange County, CA

The Challenge

The customer was using an homegrown software for managing all their products and parts information for many years. Publishing was done using this system which had very limited functionality in automating catalog publishing and had no direct integration with Adobe InDesign to produce creative catalogs.