Plan Next Year’s Catalog Program

• In the last few years, three national catalogers switched from one catalog software program to another — and lost virtually all of their historical data in the process.

• One national home goods cataloger’s software package continues to generate reports in such e-mail-clogging, spreadsheet-drowning, mind-boggling detail that it just prints, files and totally ignores them. It uses seat-of-the-pants estimates in its planning.