What is Resi-Cat? Resi-Cat is a standards-based catalog hierarchy for products and items used in the Residential Systems Integration industry. Resi-Cat is currently used by dozens of BlueDog’s customers, representing decades of experience and best practices. Resi-Cat covers every functional area and step—from sales, to engineering, to accounting for inventory control, including both stock and non-inventory parts. This approach makes accurate financial reporting easier and minimizes errors such as overstating or underestimating the value of inventory, for instance.
What's the "So What"?
Until now, there has been no known unified industry standard catalog for integrators, manufacturers and distributors. Historically, integration companies, manufacturers, distributors, and business software companies have developed and used their own hierarchies—often many variations—making managing product and labor catalogs difficult and more costly than necessary.
Integrators implementing Resi-Cat have seen significant improvements across all departments in their business.
They are able to find products more easily for use in sales, proposal, engineering, properly accounting for all phases of their project life-cycle.
The categories can be mapped to the correct account in the general ledger (e.g. inventory vs. non-inventory). Resulting in better financial management of working capital and cash.
More importantly, reporting on business performance becomes more streamlined and more impactful.
The hierarchy balances the needs of the entire business stream; thus we have made deliberate trade-offs in laying out the hierarchy:
From proposal writing (budget and scope level)
To design and engineering (detailed specification)
To procurement (purchasing products)
To installation
And finally accounting.
Why are we sharing it, for free? Sharing Resi-Cat is our contribution to helping streamline business processes and increase efficiency and interoperability across our industry. We believe that standards help spur not only efficiency and profitability, but also innovation and growth. Said differently, standardization will ultimately help all of us do what we do better, faster, more easily and raise the level of capability and professionalism across the industry. We are publishing Resi-Cat for public access under the Creative Commons licensing model. This enables anyone to use and modify it. If you do modify it, Creative Commons requires that you share the changes with the community so that the industry can benefit. Questions about Creative Commons?