Five Steps to Better Product Data Management in Construction

Most of the argument about product data management in UK construction is already settled. In new research among 80 senior decision-makers at UK builders’ merchants and building materials manufacturers, 92% face at least one product data challenge. The average business loses 26 hours a week managing and fixing product data, and a third have lost sales as a direct result. Nobody in the sector disputes that there is a problem.

What the same research makes clear is that the thing stopping people is not conviction. 91% cite at least one barrier to digital transformation, and the two biggest are uncertainty around return on investment (58%) and a lack of internal expertise or resources (53%). Leadership resistance sits well down the list at 36%, and unclear business priorities at 31%. The will is there. The proof and the know-how are what’s missing.

So this is the practical version. Here is what the businesses furthest ahead actually did, in the order that makes it work, and how to answer the two barriers that stall everyone else.

The figures here come from The State of Product Data in UK Construction 2026. MRA Research conducted it for Pimberly, in the field during April and May 2026. Download the full report.

1. Name a commercial owner

Product data sits with the Data/IT team in 45% of businesses. 10% put it with commercial teams, 5% with e-commerce or digital. Not one respondent said there was no clear owner, so this is not neglect. It is ownership in the wrong place: a revenue problem filed as a technical task, competing for attention with everything else on an IT roadmap.

39% name a lack of internal ownership or governance among their biggest product data challenges. That is the same finding from the other direction.

The step is not “hire someone”. It is deciding which commercial leader carries the number, and giving them sign-off on what goes live. Everything below this step gets easier once that person exists, and stays theoretical until they do. Steve Collinge argues the same thing in episode three of our podcast: without an owner, nobody fights for the investment.

2. Give every supplier one route in and one specification to meet

51% name integrating supplier data among their biggest challenges. 48% have experienced problems managing supplier data as a direct outcome of poor product data. The mechanism is familiar to anyone who has done the work:

“It’s fairly archaic at the minute. All the data is pretty much spreadsheet driven… I’m just about to send another batch of emails out to suppliers saying please populate this spreadsheet and send it back.”

Group Head of Product Information Management, merchant

A shared industry data source solves part of this. It gives you an accredited baseline for the manufacturers it covers, and that is genuinely useful. But it reaches only the suppliers you have access to. The rest of your base still sends whatever shape suits them.

That is why the businesses ahead give every supplier the same route in and the same specification to meet. They validate against it at the point of entry, rather than after the data has landed in three systems.

3. Hold each product once, and adapt it to each channel

Only 30% manage product data centrally. 68% run it across several systems, and 60% name maintaining up-to-date information as their single biggest challenge. Those two facts are the same fact. If a specification lives in four places, keeping it current is four jobs, and someone will miss at least one of them.

The alternative is one governed record that every channel draws from, in the shape that channel needs. Web, branch, trade counter, marketplaces and customer portals all read the same product, presented differently. One interviewee described the goal plainly:

“My utopia is a system that feeds every other channel partner’s system, automatically.”

Asset Data & Compliance Manager, manufacturer

This is also the step that fixes distribution, and distribution is where the sector is weakest. 56% still name sharing product data with customers and partners as a challenge.

4. Write for the buyer, not the database

Getting the specification right is table stakes. Dimensions, weight, pack sizes, certifications, BS and IP ratings all have to be correct, and a shared data source will give you that baseline. So will it give the same baseline to every competitor drawing on it, in the same words.

The difference is what you build on top. Take the same radiator sold to two buyers. A maintenance manager specifying it for a hospital needs the IP rating, the durability and proof it is easy to clean. A plumber fitting out a high-end bathroom needs standout imagery, lifestyle content and a marketing-led description, with the technical detail one click away. Same product, same specification, two different sales.

“You’ve got your end user, you’ve got your installer, you’ve got your specifications so requirements vary by all of those different customer types.”

Product Compliance & Data Manager, manufacturer

95% of respondents rate high-quality product information as important when making purchasing decisions. Being findable and convincing across search, AI answers and marketplaces depends entirely on this layer.

5. Treat compliance as an output, not a project

95% are familiar with the Digital Product Passport, but only 22% are completely confident they are ready for it. 31% have already hit compliance or regulatory risks because of poor product data. The instinct is to run compliance as its own workstream, with its own spreadsheet and its own deadline.

The businesses ahead do not. They hold certificates, BS and IP ratings, EPDs and datasheets against each product alongside everything else, and produce them in whatever format a regulation or a customer demands. Tim Bodill, VP of Digital Product Passports at Pimberly, makes the structural point:

“Compliance is about gathering product data, enriching it and then outputting it in a compliant format. These are the key functions of a PIM system and, managed correctly, will provide the required compliance capability, regardless of what that is.”

Get steps one to four right for commercial reasons and compliance largely arrives with them. Worth remembering, though, that 95% see compliance readiness as an emerging differentiator while it is really the opposite. Meeting it keeps you in the market. It does not win you a customer.

Answering the two barriers to product data management

Proving the return (58%). The evidence is already inside the business, and it is the same evidence this research collected. 26 hours a week is £40,000 to £55,000 a year at a fully loaded £30 to £40 an hour, roughly the cost of one employee. A third of businesses have lost sales, and 31% have had launches delayed. We set out that calculation in full in the real cost of poor construction product data.

There is an upside half to the case too. Around 7% of construction sales go through online channels today, and the research puts realistic headroom for advanced merchants at 15% to 25%. One distributor interviewed is already at around 24%, with site visits doubling after it opened its product pages to search. The uplift needed to justify the investment is smaller than most people assume.

“It’s not that people don’t want it, it’s getting sign-off without a number to point to.”

Group Head of PIM, merchant

Run the hours calculation for your own business before you do anything else. It is the number that gets you the meeting.

Finding the expertise (53%). This is the barrier that self-serve infrastructure does not touch. A data pool is something you wire in and run yourself, and it closes none of the expertise gap the research describes. Vendor-led implementation is the practical answer. The people who built the platform run the deployment, your team learns it as it goes in, and product data expertise stays available after go-live. Bought that way, the expertise arrives with the platform rather than being something you have to recruit first.

Where to start

If you do one thing from this list, do step one. Name the commercial owner. The return case, the supplier specification and the channel work all follow from someone owning the outcome, and none of them happen reliably without it.