Electrical distributors have two general CD-ROM catalog products from which to choose.
CD-ROM products have been popping up in the electrical world with increasing frequency in the past few years. Some manufacturers are putting out their own CD catalogs. Some distributors also are creating catalogs for their customers. The idea behind these CD-ROM products, of course, is that by taking the information distributors have traditionally gotten from manufacturers’ printed catalogs and turning it into electronic text and images, that information can be stored in a tiny fraction of the space and can be searched, sorted and used more effectively.
Two catalogs that have been on the market for more than a year now propose to put all the information from major electrical products manufacturers in one place. AnswerPro, published by the National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED), Wilton, Conn., and CatTrak, published by Trade Service Corp., San Diego, Calif., are intended to relieve electrical distributors of their walls of shelves packed with vendor annual catalogs, and to replace those hundreds of catalogs with a few shiny little compact disks loaded with text and graphics, updated more frequently.
Now that enough time has passed for NAED and Trade Service to work most of the bugs out of their offerings, we thought we’d take a look at the two products. How do they compare with each other, and how do they go about doing what they do?
Let’s start out by stating up front that the purpose of this article is not to name a winner. Don’t skip to the end to see who won, because it’s not there. The purpose of this article is to examine the two catalogs—to look at how they work and what they can do for a distributor. CatTrak and AnswerPro are distinctly different in how they work and what they have to offer a distributor. You can draw your personal preliminary conclusions from the information presented here, and we encourage you to spend some time with both products before making up your mind whether to use either one, both or neither.
Trade Service introduced CatTrak in November 1995. The company has been an important source of information in the electrical industry for more than half a century, providing product and pricing data on more than 400 manufacturers’ products to electrical distributors and their customers.
Trade Service declined to disclose exactly how many electrical distributors subscribe to CatTrak, but John Henry, industry relations manager for Trade Service, says the number is “in the hundreds.” Subscribers receive monthly updates of the catalog information. The catalog now includes 83 manufacturers and 22,465 catalog pages, and Trade Service is hoping to get the rest of the 423 manufacturers included in the company’s pricing service on CatTrak within the next 18 months, Henry says.
NAED introduced AnswerPro in January 1996. The association hired Automated Catalogue Services LP (ACS), Wayne, Pa., to produce the catalog for its members and others in the electrical industry. ACS also produces electronic catalogs for several other distributor associations, including the Association for High Technology Distribution (AHTD), Philadelphia, Pa., and the Specialty Tools and Fasteners Distributors Association (STAFDA), Elm Grove, Wis.
AnswerPro has 255 electrical distributor companies that have renewed their subscriptions to the monthly catalog service this year, says Carin Freas, associate publisher for ACS. The catalog includes 136 manufacturers and over 22,000 catalog pages, according to ACS. Both systems run in the Microsoft Windows operating system on IBM-compatible personal computers (486 or greater) and both require a CD-ROM drive. AnswerPro is the more memory-intensive of the pair, requiring 40 megabytes (MB) to 60 MB of free disk space and a minimum of 8 MB of random access memory (RAM). CatTrak needs just 10 MB of disk space and a minimum of 4 MB of RAM. Both systems also offer network installation options.
CatTrak
When you launch yourself into CatTrak, you start in a window that has three “panes.” You’re given three search methods to choose from: “Table of Contents,” “Page Header” and “Catalog Number.”
Searching in the Table of Contents mode, you see a list of the manufacturers included in the catalog in the pane on the left, which is called the look-up pane. You can type in the name of the manufacturer you want or select it from the list. That generates a list of the catalog pages for that manufacturer in the center pane, called the pages pane. Clicking on one of the listed catalog pages brings up an image of that page in the pane on the right, called the image pane.
The Page Header mode gives you a list of all the catalog pages on the disk in the look-up pane, listed by the title or header of each page. Because the page headers often include descriptive words or product names, you can enter keywords to narrow the list to those pages related to the product you’re looking for. As with the Table of Contents search, the pages pane lists the actual pages, and clicking on those pages gives you an image in the image pane.
The Catalog Number search mode gives you a list of all the catalog numbers for all the manufacturers on the disk in the look-up pane. You can narrow the search by entering the name of the manufacturer you want, then clicking on the catalog number; or you can enter the catalog number you probably know by heart anyway. Again, the pages pane gives you the pages from that manufacturer’s catalog containing information on that product. Selecting any of those pages gives you an image of the page in the image pane.
Searching for products using the three-pane window format is fast and intuitive, allowing you to get right to the pages you want to see. Once you’ve found the page with the product information you want, you can click on a toolbar button that makes the image pane fill the entire screen. A variety of tools enable you to move around the page or re-size it to zoom in on information you want to read more closely.
One of the many nice features of CatTrak is the use of the right mouse button within the image pane. Clicking that button switches among three modes of action—a “lasso mode,” which allows you to select a portion of the page image for magnification; a “pan mode,” which lets you move the page image around the screen; and a “selection mode,” which allows you to select a portion of the page image for copying so that you can paste it into another Windows program, such as a word processor or graphics program. Using these three modes, finding and using what you want from a catalog page quickly becomes second nature.
These functions can also be used via pull-down menus at the top of the window, and there are toolbar buttons that allow you to move around the page or re-size it. Other buttons on the toolbar allow you to flip from one page to the next, to copy all or a selected part of the image, and to print or send e-mail.
Most of the page images in CatTrak are rough scans, basically the quality of a fax. You can read all but the fine print, but the characters are not smooth. In some cases, the labels calling out parts of products on manufacturers’ line drawings are virtually unreadable, making those images only marginally useful for sending an explanation to a customer. Photographs are reduced to rough, high-contrast approximations of the appearance of the actual product.
These problems are minimized or disappear on catalog pages that were submitted to Trade Service as desktop publishing files rather than printed catalogs, which to date is just a few. In the pages that were submitted in electronic files, the images stay relatively sharp even when magnified. Henry of Trade Service says a growing number of the manufacturers listed in CatTrak are submitting pages in electronic files, so the image quality should improve over time.
Additionally, Trade Service is working on a new version of the catalog that will enable it to use color graphics and higher-resolution images, Henry says.
As it is, the quality of the images in CatTrak is generally suitable for faxing to customers, which is a major benefit of CD-ROM catalogs equipped with fax software connections.
CatTrak contains the images of every page in the manufacturers’ print catalogs, from front cover to back cover. If you’re familiar with the print version, everything you are used to finding there is included in CatTrak. According to Henry of Trade Service, this comprehensive approach is the reason CatTrak contains about the same number of catalog pages as AnswerPro, even though it includes about 40% fewer manufacturers.
Another very useful feature in CatTrak is its bookmark capabilities. By checking boxes next to products in the pages pane, you can compile and save a file that includes just those products. That file can be associated with an icon, such as a manufacturer’s logo or a generic product icon—a conduit fitting, for example. This feature makes it easy to customize the catalog so you can find products quickly when a customer calls.
AnswerPro
AnswerPro opens with a single search screen that has a number of places for entering search criteria used narrow your search to find the product you seek; these include manufacturer name, product type, product identifier and key words. If you enter a vendor name or select one from the pull-down list, the product-type selections are narrowed to those products made by that manufacturer. If you don’t select a manufacturer, you can choose from all product types included in the catalog.
You can also search by key word, either within a selected manufacturer’s pages or within a list of pages you’ve already gathered in a previous search, or you can use key words to search throughout the catalog. The AnswerPro search functions take some practice to master, but once you understand how it works, narrowing your search to capture just those product pages that meet your needs becomes quick and precise.
All searches yield a list of catalog pages matching the search criteria you entered. You can then select one page or as many as you want from that list for viewing. You can view a text version or image version of the page with a click of a button. The search window is then replaced by a view screen with a toolbar that allows the user to manipulate the information in the pages.
This is where AnswerPro really shines. The catalog pages in AnswerPro are rich in features. Going beyond a simple image of the print catalog page, AnswerPro gives you the ability to manipulate the data within that page. For instance, the toolbar in the view screen includes buttons for physical dimensions, shipping information, certification information, warranty information, pricing, and many other kinds of data. In pages where those functions are available, a click on the shipping information button, for example, causes the system to go to the shipping information on the page and highlight that text in red. A click on the MSDS button calls up a page of material safety data sheets pertaining to the products on that page.
On some pages, there is text highlighted in blue that links you with other, related pages in much the way hypertext links work on the World Wide Web. These links can make navigation within a manufacturer’s catalog pages more intuitive, getting you to the information you need quickly.
The photographs and line drawings that appear in AnswerPro are of very high quality, and many are in full color. These images can be copied easily for pasting into other applications to create your own product literature.
Yet even with the high image quality, fine print that is part of a line drawing and even some of the detail in many drawings are still too rough to be read. For these pages, until imaging technology improves, you will still be better off having the print catalog at hand.
The high-resolution graphics, the highlighted text functions and the hyperlinks are possible because most of the catalog pages manufacturers give ACS for inclusion in AnswerPro are submitted in desktop publishing files, says Freas of ACS. Even catalogs submitted in printed form are not left alone. ACS scans the pages using optical character recognition (OCR) software, which interprets the characters on the page, creating a file that can be manipulated much like a desktop publishing file. With that file, ACS can highlight parts of the text, change colors, etc.
This conversion also enables ACS to index the words in the catalog pages. Every word in every catalog page in the system is indexed, which enables the key word search function to capture every occurrence of a term you want to find. This can result in an excessive number of “hits” if you search using a generic term, such as “fitting,” but if you refine your search, you’ll be sure to capture every occurrence of the term.
AnswerPro has some other features that make it useful. As with CatTrak, AnswerPro has a bookmark feature, though it is more difficult to use than CatTrak’s because it doesn’t associate the bookmarks with icons that can be easily accessed. AnswerPro also has small icons that show which manufacturers are affiliated with certain distributor buying and marketing groups. This feature is helpful for distributors that belong to the groups, making it easy for them to select those lines for which they get group credit or rebates. The Equity Organization, Greensboro, N.C.; and IMARK Group, Oxon Hill, Md., are included in this feature now. Freas says ACS would like to include other buying groups, but some don’t release their vendor lists. You can, however, customize the display to show some other icon, such as a smiley face, next to your preferred manufacturers.
AnswerPro has a feature that allows manufacturers to lock out distributors that are not authorized to carry their lines. These lines are identified by a key. While this feature enables manufacturers to protect limited distribution franchises, it can be frustrating for users trying to help customers make comparisons. Only a handful of manufacturers use the lockout feature, and Freas says they are tending to move away from it. After all, the information on the disk is already available in the printed version, which is hardly a private document.
AnswerPro includes the beginnings of the product descriptor database that has become the subject of a rallying cry for some NAED distributors in the past year. AnswerPro includes five data fields for those manufacturers that supply the data on their products: catalog number, UPC number, product descriptor, quantity measure and list price. ACS is eager to get more of the 19 fields included in the association’s database standard into the catalog, but is waiting to see what subscribers need, says Freas.
CatTrak has no database functions, and it has prices only where they happen to be included in the printed catalogs. Trade Service is looking forward to embracing data standards being developed by the associations, says Henry. Many users of CatTrak today use it in conjunction with the company’s Tra-Ser pricing CD-ROM product, looking up the products they seek in CatTrak, then finding the price for it in Tra-Ser. Henry says that instead of including data fields such as pricing in CatTrak itself, the company will probably create some interconnection with Tra-Ser and sell the products as a package.
On the subject of pricing, you may be wondering what these CD-ROM wonders will run you. CatTrak sells a 12-month subscription for $495 per installation for stand-alone PCs. Network installations cost $795 per year, with no additional charge per user. A 12-month subscription to AnswerPro, on the other hand, costs $1,250 for the first copy, $600 each for up to six copies and $275 for each copy beyond the first six. Network installations of AnswerPro go for a $2,500 base fee, plus $175 for each additional user. These were the prices as of late February, and they are subject to change.
If there is any conclusion to draw from this comparison, it is this: If you decide to install and use these CD-ROM catalogs, don’t get so excited about the hype that you throw out your paper catalogs. Not yet. Despite advances in imaging technology, some of the digital images on the CDs lack the resolution of print. You’ll want to have the hard copy on hand for ultimate reference.
That said, it’s clear that CD-ROM catalogs have an important role to play in any distributor’s operations. Because of their compactness, their powerful searching capabilities, the fact that they’re updated monthly—meaning all your people will be working with the latest information—and the fact that they give you so many manufacturers’ catalogs in one place, they are a valuable tool. The speed and ease with which even a novice user can find the information he or she needs will quickly make these electronic tools an indispensible supplement to your catalog library.
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