Dräger catalog

by Kurt Rodenhizer, MS, MBA

Dräger Medical provides hospitals with medical systems designed to optimize clinical processes. They have several offices throughout the world and there are over 900 parts in their product catalog.

Challenges:
Dräger’s parts as described in the product catalog change frequently and it is difficult to keep the customers and product specialists up-to-do-date with the most recent information. Another problem is that following a joint venture agreement with Siemens Medical, there were several sections of the product catalog in different publication programs including MS Publisher, Quark Express and Adobe PageMaker. The objective was to consolidate all versions of the catalog into one and to investigate ways to more quickly publish product update information.

Solutions

Consolidating data into one master record:
ePD was contracted to work on the project and the recommendation was that all the parts and their descriptions be loaded into a database so the editing can be done from one source. After the part numbers, description and images were updated, a software code would be used to export the data into the preferred publication software.

A customized data entry form was created to assist in data entry and the master database
was placed in a network folder so that multiple people could work with the same file.

Automatic generation of the product catalog on demand:
The software protocol written to export the data into the publication software’s customized style sheet (template) allows Dräger to upgrade their product catalog on demand and as easily as executing a mail merge.

All the text and images used for the catalog comes from one master database and once the
export protocol has been written, catalogs can be update on demand.

Results:
1. The text from several segments of the product catalog were collected into a master database it was edited by product specialists.
2. A style sheet was created in the publication software so the text and images from the database would generate the product catalog automatically and whenever needed.