ProductFormat for Building Product Data

Construction Specifications Canada (CSC) has endorsed a new format for organizing building product information. The format, called ProductFormat 2008 will improve the organization of technical data and product presentations for building products.

The construction industry has many well established formats for organizing information. Standardized formats increase efficiency on the part of someone looking for usable data and decrease risks that critical information might be overlooked. Specification organization benefits from CSI formats, drawings are increasingly organized according to the National CAD Standard, and a host of new formats are being developed to accommodate increasing computerization of construction information. Unfortunately, the US construction industry does not have an agreed upon format for building product data.

In the past, CSI's popular Spec-Data Format provided a widely used format for technical data sheet; it has all but dissappeard since CSI sold the program to Reed Construction Data. McGraw Hill had a cumbersome format for Sweets catalog files, but now Sweets has all but dissappeared. The applicabilty of both these programs was limited by the need to pay to be in either Spec-Data or Sweets, making them less than universally available as a industry standard.

A ProductFormat presentation is organized around three headings that generally parallel the three parts of the industry standard SectionFormat:

ProductFormat SectionFormat
Product Features Part 1 - General
Product Properties Part 2 - Products
Product Placement Part 3 - Execution

This will make it familiar to architects, engineers, and builders, and simplify the transition from product selection to product specification.

Feel free to call me at 818-774-0003 to discuss whether SectionFormat can be useful to your product presentation.