The Brand Table is a recent addition to the Auto Care Association’s PIES and ACES catalog standards. This table is designed to make it easy to identify different parts brands by creating a standard coding system, working alongside their Product Classification Database (PCdb) and Product Attribute Database (PAdb) to correctly identify and categorize parts. This ACA Technology Minute video will give you a quick overview of the Brand Table.
How does the Brand Table work?
Entries in the Brand Table are labeled using a hierarchy that breaks down brands into parent companies, brand owners, brands and sub-brands, with each of these categories getting its own four digit alphabetic code. This helps avoid confusion with brands that use common names like “Professional” or “Performance.” The code for one company’s “Performance” sub-brand will be different from another company’s “Performance” sub-brand.
The code is used to specify and organize product brands on the back end, but the brand names will show up on the front end in the search and display. For example, if a product has the auto care market brand code “ABCD EFGH IJKL MNOP,” this will be translated to display its real brand name, which could be something like “BigPartsCo Durommax Bushing Master Performance” when the catalog is published. Of course, on the front end, users are typically more interested in the last two categories. For example, when using ShowMeTheParts’ online database, search users see the Brand Table’s brand and sub-brand labels show up under the supplier and brand categories. Using the previous example, the user would just see “Bushing Master” as the supplier and “Performance” as the brand category.
The Brand Table is already built into the standards for PIES and ACES. PIES uses auto care market brand codes to give products unique identifiers. By including the brand table code in catalog entries, problems can be avoided when two separate parts are issued using the same part number. ACES refers to these codes to identify the brands included in an electronic catalog data file. Enter the code in the part entry, and the part branding will show up automatically in the correct fields when the catalog is published.
The Auto Care Association has set up a separate website, brandtable.pricedex.com, to manage the Brand Table. From here, new brand identifiers can be requested, current identifiers can be found using a search engine, and the whole Brand Table can be downloaded.
How do you add the Brand Table to your catalog?
Vertical Development has been working on ACES and PIES catalog software for decades, so it should be no surprise that our tools already support this coding standard. We can help you get your products coded to meet the latest standards, whether you’re just starting to build a standard catalog or need to add new classification standards like PAdb and the Brand Table to your existing catalog.
Need to get your products labeled for the Brand Table to meet reseller catalog requirements? We can help your company get up to speed with our tools for a Do It Yourself (DIY) solution, or help you with the process with our Do It For Me (DIFM) services. Of course, like all of our products, everything is integrated, so that any changes you make to your ACES or PIES catalog can be transferred to the ShowMeTheParts public database and ShowMeTheParts-based private databases as well.
Ready to get started on your catalog? Call us at (847) 609-9540 or schedule a call today!
