Case Study: R.E. Michel Company achieves centralized product management and rapid print & online catalog publishing with Questudio CatalogStudio

Leading HVAC/R Distributor Solves Print, Web and Content Management Problem using CatalogStudio

R.E. Michel Company, one of the largest wholesale HVAC/R distributors with a 1,100‑page catalog and over 25,000 products, faced an inefficient, labor‑intensive publishing process built on static QuarkXPress pages and fragmented data (pricing in an AS/400 but most product info not in a central database). Updating, adding or removing items and producing the annual catalog could take up to six months, and the company needed a central repository and tools to publish print and web catalogs and enable online ordering. Questudio was engaged to address this challenge.

Questudio implemented its CatalogStudio solution (with InStudio) and migrated data into a Microsoft SQL Server database, extracting, converting, cleaning and normalizing information from the 1,100 Quark pages and linking thousands of image assets within 60 days. As a result, R.E. Michel Company can now manage product content centrally, make last‑minute changes, publish its primary annual catalog plus multiple targeted/custom catalogs quickly, and use the same database for an online catalog with direct ordering—delivering a dramatic reduction in publishing time and much greater publishing flexibility.

R.E. Michel Company