An e-catalog allows SMC Corp.of America to efficiently present its complex product line to manufacturing customers.

By Alicia Orr Suman

But not only were the print books expensive to create, maintain and distribute, they quickly became outdated as new products became available. More importantly, a print catalog, even at its best, couldn’t effectively show all of the details for the full range of product options SMC had available. Each product in an SMC catalog might have hundreds of different iterations based on all the manufacturing specs the purchasing engineers could want — parameters and values such as bore size or stroke.