|
A competitive marketplace coupled with the ease of digital distribution has seen the frequency of product catalogs multiply in recent years, causing challenges for customers and manufacturers alike.
It's no secret the frequency with which architectural product catalogs, especially those from major manufacturer, has increased dramatically in the recent years. It was not so long ago that every major brand released a single annual catalog revision, normally at the same time each year. Assa Abloy began the year with catalog releases for the Yale group at the beginning of January, followed by the rest in successive months thereafter. Allegion (then Ingersoll-Rand) did the same, usually with a major brand catalog releasing each month. This pattern was typical of most hardware manufacturers. Occasionally there were small updates throughout the year, but those generally took the form of a few loose pages that customers could easily slide into their current editions. Those were the days.
In recent years, the number of catalog releases from many manufacturers have multiplied - often by a factor of four or five. Allegion, for example, followed a full series of catalogs updates last October with a new set of updates this month - all in anticipation of another set of updates this coming April. It's also worth mentioning that all those updates for all those individual brands were done for both the U.S. and Canadian versions. Assa Abloy, not to be outdone, released updated books last June, only to update many of them in August to accommodate to new tariff surcharges - that were then rescinded in the beginning of this year.
This increased release frequency is by no means limited to the major manufacturers, but they clearly have the greatest impact given their popularity and the number of brands they represent.
The increased release frequency can be attributed to a number of factors including the fluctuating costs of material and shipping, and changes to import tariffs. Beyond that, price changes are often tied to nothing more than market trends. If a given manufacturer drops their price on given product, their competitors naturally follow suit with pricing on their equivalents. This results in chain reactions of price changes throughout multiple brands.
Technology has also been a major factor in perpetuating the increased rate of catalog updates. In past, a catalog update was a major undertaking - and a costly one. Updates needed to be printed, collated, shrink wrapped and mailed to each and every customer. This obviously meant that catalog revisions needed to be carefully planned and completed well in advance of them coming into effect. New pages were meticulously checked prior to printed, as error corrections meant additional costs in reprints and redistribution. Minor catalog revisions were concise; only the affected pages were re-printed, so there was no doubt as to whether or not changes were made on any given page.
Not today. The advent of PDF files and web-based distribution has changed the game entirely. Gone are the costs previously associated with printed catalog update, making it far more tenable to update with greater frequency. Beyond the frequency however, the new found ease of dissemination has led to additional challenges for those on the receiving end. Publishing new catalog editions has become as simple as modifying a digital documents and outputting a new PDF file.
There is no longer any pressure to complete and release price books with sufficient lead time for customers, or software vendors, to update their systems to reflect the new pricing. It's not uncommon for updated price books to become available only a few weeks - or even days - of them coming into effect. Even minor updates have become increasingly challenging. In the past, only the updated pages were sent out; a clear indicator of which parts of the price book have been modified. Most manufacturers now simply publish a new PDF in its entirety. While some may attempt to summarize their changes, in most cases people are left to discover them for themselves. For software publishers like AVAware and those charged with updating customers' pricing systems this means manually reviewing the entire book, page by page, in an effort to identify changes to pricing and product options.
The net result of all this is confusion. Product catalogs, their many options, and of course pricing change more frequently than customers can comfortably keep pace with. As a company that supports architectural product distributors, AVAware has seen a marked increase in calls inquiring about options that have changed in, or been removed entirely from price books.
The increased pace at which price books are being revised has been further exacerbated by the fact that related documents and systems appear to be unable to keep up with the changes. This is most apparent in product catalogs that often show products and options that don't appear in corresponding price books; often because one or the other has been updated at different times. Once again, the result is confusion amongst customers looking to pricing products they believed were available, only to find out they were removed in the last update.
The confusion doesn't end with the customers however. Just as the catalog and price books are often "out of sync" with each other, the internal order systems maintained by the various manufacturers are quite often just as "out of sync" with both them. Attempts to confirm pricing or order products are often met with inconsistency and news that a given option is "no longer available".
The simple fact of the matter is that all this confusion and data discord is an evitable byproduct of realities of today's dynamic market. Given that many of the most popular industry brands are owned by a small number of manufacturers, each of them has large number of catalogs to maintain on an ongoing basis. It not surprising that the various publications and databases have become somewhat incongruous over time.
The solution is simple... at least in concept: A single unified product database for each product brand. One that be used both for ordering and the preparation of customer resources such as catalogs and price books; a database with a straightforward architecture that can be accessed by multiple applications, both internally by the manufacturers and customers and whatever system they are using. Imagine a platform on which real-time order entry, product validation and price quotes are a reality; where changes to products and options were instantly transmitted throughout the ecosystem. Alas, we can only hope.
For the time being, all we can do is our very best to keep up with it all. Even with all of the aforementioned challenges, our internal catalog team works diligently to produce AVAware-compatible versions of manufacturer prices books, quickly enough to coincide with their effective dates. We rely on the many relationships we have forged with key personnel at the various manufacturers to help use product the most timely and accurate digital catalog library offered to the architectural openings industry.
|
