Get The Right InfoGet The Right Info

Brady Corp., a maker of high-performance labels and signs, needed a better way than spreadsheets to manage information related to its 150,000-plus products. It also wanted better tools to run its online catalog.

So the $671 million-a-year company turned to FullTilt Solutions Inc., which makes product-information-management systems. The software has helped Brady update product details in its online catalog, which lists more than 50,000 stock products and thousands of custom products. Now it's upgrading to a new version of FullTilt's Perfect Product Suite, released last week.

The software collects product attributes and other information from multiple enterprise data sources and adjusts definitions to conform to a single standard. The system updates and synchronizes information as it changes.

The result? Faster, less-expensive, and more-accurate production and maintenance of its online catalog, says Laura Talavera, E-commerce coordinator at Brady. "The biggest benefit of the software is the flexibility and organization of the stock-keeping units it offers and the ease of being able to load the information into the tool, as opposed to working with a spreadsheet where things can get messed up easily," Talavera says.

Brady plans to implement FullTilt's newest version in the next two months and will expand its use to additional divisions and non-U.S. users. Also, the company plans to create custom catalog views for different distributors and product managers.

The new version features a business-process-management system that adds workflow. In the past, FullTilt relied on third-party tools from vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and webMethods.

The Perfect Product Suite's data-synchronization capabilities could be useful in the deployment of radio-frequency identification, says Bob Moyer, president of FullTilt. Most companies keep their product data in multiple databases, ranging from enterprise resource planning to spreadsheets and documents. That means there's no central repository for all the RFID data. And often there are duplicates and inconsistencies throughout databases, he says. "Having product data on RFID tags doesn't help if it's wrong," Moyer adds.

FullTilt's Perfect Product Suite is priced between $100,000 and $1 million, depending on the number of seats and the number of products under management.