Providing accurate and easily accessible product information is critical in today's e-business environment. If buyers can't find up-to-date product information, they won't buy your products. Your ability to manage your content is the key to the success of any catalog solution.

TechniCon's ContentStudio provides a full-featured, Web-based content management system for adding and editing data in your online catalogs.

Employing an easy-to-use Explorer-type interface with drag and drop functionality, ContentStudio eliminates the need for programmers and special production staff to maintain your catalogs.

Content stakeholders, such as marketing and engineering staff, can manage the content and appearance of your online catalogs.

ContentStudio's features can be customized to be as simple or sophisticated as required for individual users. Balloon help is available to assist novice users.

Advanced search capabilities allow you to easily find and modify related catalog items. Changes happen in real-time and can be viewed immediately.

ContentStudio makes the creation of custom catalogs a snap. Starting from a master product catalog, custom catalogs can be quickly generated to meet the specific requirements of a customer, distributor or region. Product data from multiple suppliers can be aggregated into a unified catalog.

Web-based, ContentStudio supports collaborative product content management from geographically dispersed offices, facilitating maintenance of localized pricing or product content.

TechniCon's data model is designed specifically to manage complex product data, accommodating all product attributes and behaviors.

Tables can be quickly set up to define the rules used by the product configurator to flag the selection of incompatible options.

Multiple price lists can be associated with any product or option, allowing customer-specific pricing. Percentage and tiered discounting are also supported.

Authentication features allow you to protect your data by controlling content access and publication. Users are assigned role-based rights as viewers, editors and administrators.

ContentStudio not only manages catalog data, but how to use that data. For example, you can specify when to display a particular image or how to list an item in an online shopping cart.

ContentStudio data can be published to PDFs to generate print catalogs.

In a typical system implementation, TechniCon's Legacy-to-Web Tools are used to "bulk-load" the online catalog from legacy product data. Existing product information in almost any format can be quickly repurposed for use in your catalogs.

To retrieve additional product data, ContentStudio is easily customized to allow input from (and output to) legacy systems. Information, such as pricing and sizing, is easily updated from your ERP, CRM and CAD systems.

• Legacy-to-Web Tools: Content can be extracted from all standard formats, such as text, CSV, SIF, PDF and CAD data. Commonly used content transformation rules can be defined and leveraged across multiple catalogs. Taxonomies can be imported from existing SIF and XML files.
• Flexible Product Classifications: Hierarchal trees allow product classification from general to specific characteristics. ContentStudio allows multiple tree structures for customer and distributor-specific taxonomies, and supports standard formats such as UN/SPSC.
• Common Feature and Option Sets: Common feature and option sets can be defined and applied across products and product lines, e.g. applying a maximum stroke feature across a group of actuators or a set of fabric options across a line of chairs.
• Advanced Editing Tools: Comprehensive functions are used to add, delete and edit product, classification and attribute data. For example, when a product is deleted, all associated attribute values are deleted.
  
  Intelligent drag-and-drop automatically updates properties, such as feature sets, when a product is moved from one product group to another.
• Complex Pricing Models: Products and options can have any number of associated price lists to support historical price lists and customer or region-specific pricing. Sale and tiered-discounting features can apply percentage and set-point reductions to product pricing.
• Intra- and Inter-Configuration Rules: Users can define intra-configuration rules, such as option compatibilities on a single product; and inter-configuration rules, such as spatial relationships between products (e.g. what valves can be placed into what manifolds or how workstation components can be fitted together.)
  
  An internal configurator is provided to test user-defined rules.
• Reduced Costs: ContentStudio eliminates the need for special staff or programmers to maintain your e-catalogs, reducing costs and production bottlenecks.
• Quicker-to-Market Products: You can quickly and easily keep catalog information accurate and up-to-date. The result: fewer order errors, quicker-to-market products, and increased customer satisfaction.
• Seamless Integration with CustomCommerce: Sharing a common data repository, ContentStudio and CustomCommerce work in tandem to provide integrated solutions for manufacturers and distributors of complex products.