Case study · Manufacturing · Industrial
Modernizing the catalog and engineering reference platform for a steam specialty manufacturer.
Modernized
Engineering catalog with structured product data & PDFs
Faster
Spec lookups for engineers & distributors
Mobile
Field-ready responsive UX for distributor sales calls
Multi-year
Long-running engagement with continued enhancements
About the client
Steam specialty equipment for industrial heating and process applications.
Watson McDaniel manufactures and supplies steam traps, regulators, control valves, separators, and related steam specialty equipment used across food and beverage, chemical, pharmaceutical, energy, and heavy manufacturing. Engineers specify these parts during plant design. Distributors quote them. End customers maintain them.
Three audiences. One catalog. Each audience needs a different slice of the same data — specs and dimensions for engineers, lead times and pricing for distributors, replacement-part lookups for maintenance teams.
Specs, dimensions, fitments, and PDFs across hundreds of SKUs.
The requirement
The catalog was authoritative. The platform was not keeping pace.
The product data inside Watson McDaniel was excellent — decades of engineering precision, PDF technical bulletins, fitment matrices, sizing charts. The platform that delivered it had grown over many years and become slow to update, hard to search, and clunky on the mobile devices distributors actually use in the field.
The brief asked for catalog modernization without disrupting the data integrity Watson McDaniel's engineers had built up over decades. Reorganize the surface. Do not touch the substance.
The solution
Structured product data, audience-specific surfaces, mobile-ready UX.
We started with a content audit and a structured-data migration. The catalog moved into a model where every product has typed fields (capacity, pressure rating, connection size, materials), every PDF is linked to its parent product, and every fitment cross-references the matrix. The platform front-end was rebuilt around the three core audiences.
A featured deliverable
01 · Catalog modernization.
A featured deliverable
02 · Audience-specific surfaces.
A featured deliverable
03 · Mobile-ready engineering UX.
The impact
The catalog earns its decades of engineering work.
The product data was always authoritative. The new platform makes it usable. Engineers, distributors, and customers all get to the right answer faster, and Watson McDaniel's engineering team can update the catalog without engineering tickets.
Tech stack
What's under the hood.
Have an authoritative engineering catalog that the platform is failing?
We have shipped this exact pattern: structured data, audience-specific surfaces, mobile-ready UX, and a CMS your engineering team actually controls.