SAN DIEGO, CA – March 1, 2011 – Trade Service, the leading provider of product and pricing data to the electrical industry, introduces Submittal Manager™. The new, Internet-based, software solution allows electrical contractors to build professional-looking job submittals, start-to-finish, ready to send to the project owner, general contractor, architect, or engineer for sign-off.  Submittal Manager is also a time-saving application for electrical distributors who are asked to take on the entire submittal building task for their contractor customer, or to provide assistance in obtaining hard-to-find or custom pages, such as job-specific switchgear, or lighting configurations that are created at the manufacturer website and saved as a pdf.

Submittal Manager is the first product of its kind to focus specifically on the electrical marketplace.
The software was carefully built over many months, following detailed discussions and meetings with electrical contractors and distributors.  “From the meetings we had with our customers, it was clear that a tool like Submittal Manager was badly needed and could potentially reduce or eliminate much of what has been an extremely resource-draining process,” said Tod Moore, Sr. Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Trade Service.  “The key was to develop the application from feedback we received from the marketplace – the only true way of knowing you’ve hit the mark,” added Moore.

With Submittal Manager, Trade Service leverages its extensive library of 250,000, up-to-date manufacturer catalog pages, robust electronic mark-up tools, and other user-friendly conventions, to give customers an online, start-to-finish, method of creating a professional-looking job submittal.  Not only can users find pages quickly with targeted search methods, but Submittal Manager can also electronically match a user’s parts’ list of several hundred items, to corresponding catalog pages.  It then instantly loads them into the submittal, potentially cutting 20, 30, 60+ hours of effort down to just minutes.  And users will find that work done in previous submittals can be applied to future submittals, eliminating the need to start from scratch.

Submittal Manager is the only service that helps the user do the actual work of building the submittal.  The 250,000 catalog pages represent over 1 million electrical items that are constantly updated and can be instantly loaded into the submittal.  It also automatically classifies the document to the industry standard CSI MasterFormat®.  Submittal Manager is a professional tool that can save users up to 75% off the time it takes to do submittals the traditional way and Trade Service looks forward to helping contractors and distributors save time and money.

About Trade Service
Trade Service Company is the leading provider of product and price information to the electrical, plumbing/PVF, HVACR, industrial MRO, and office products industries.  Since 1931, the company has been the leader in content acquisition, aggregation, management, publishing, and distribution, offering a variety of products, services, and systems to meet the content needs of distributors, contractors, and government agencies.  The range of solutions provided includes printed directories, electronic catalogs, pricing data for business system updating, and robust attributed content to fuel full-functioning Internet storefronts.