What's My Number?

This is a question that many who are involved in the marketing and distribution of construction products regularly ask those of us at CSI and CSC, and until we launched MasterFormat.com there wasn’t any way to answer that question consistently or in some cases, very accurately.

Because MasterFormat is organized around the uses that products are put to on the jobsite and not the products themselves, assigning a MasterFormat number or numbers to a product can be a challenge. In some cases the set of possible uses for the product will be limited, but in most cases there will be several possible applications for a product, some perhaps even outside those expected by the manufacturer. Assigning several MasterFormat numbers to a product can make it easier for your customers to find the product they need, but can also make identifying the appropriate MasterFormat numbers and titles difficult.

That’s where CSI can help.

Identifying the right numbers and titles that employ your products in a work result requires the careful examination your product’s attributes and the ways it could be used successfully in a construction project. You must then mesh those possible uses with target audiences that you may wish to reach. Through MasterFormat.com, CSI will soon provide a service to address these questions and identify the ideal numbers and titles you’ll need on your product literature to reach your target customers. And perhaps more importantly, the MasterFormat.com database will help ensure that these decisions are made in a uniform fashion and adopted by leading product and specification information providers like ARCOM, BSD, McGraw-Hill and Reed Construction Data, in their publications and services. Integration into these resources is an essential step to helping your products and your customers find each other.

Product number consulting: coming soon to MasterFormat.com!