InstallerSHOW 2026: What Construction Professionals Really Said About Their Product Data

1. Time is the Thing Nobody Has Enough of

Time came up almost as often as organisation. Not time in the abstract — time spent on specific, repeatable tasks that most people had accepted as just part of the job. 

The pattern was consistent: a small number of people managing a large data workload manually, with every update or request triggering the same cycle of extraction, reformatting and redistribution. 

“One person does everything — it takes forever and then gets checked over by so many people before anything can go anywhere.” — Electrical Test Equipment Manufacturer

“The biggest issue for us is time — just the time it takes to get the data out of our systems before we can do anything useful with it.” — Electrical Test Equipment Manufacturer 

New product launches were where it showed most clearly. Getting a product from sign-off to live across all channels means pulling information from engineering, commercial, marketing, compliance and channel teams, all through email threads, with no single view of where things stand. That’s slow when it runs on manual coordination. It’s slower still when it runs on one person. 

2. Nobody Had the Full Picture 

The same idea came up across nearly every conversation: too many systems, no single view, and everyone working from a version of the data that might not be right. 

“We don’t have a central source of truth. Product data is spread across too many places and nobody has the full picture.” — Building Products Manufacturer 

When product data lives across ERP exports, shared drives, team spreadsheets and individual inboxes, you never have the complete picture. You’ve always got a version, just not necessarily the right one. 

It’s rarely a case of not caring about data quality. Most businesses do. The problem is structural. The data is where it’s always been: in the systems that generated it, rather than in one place everyone can actually trust.

3. Every Customer Has a Unique Request 

For manufacturers selling through multiple merchant and distribution partners, there’s another layer. Every partner has their own attribute template, their own field names, their own image specs. The product data is the same. The work of preparing it isn’t. 

“Every customer wants data in a different format. We’re essentially rebuilding the same information from scratch for each one.” — Bathroom Brand 

For any manufacturer with more than a handful of channel partners, that’s a real structural overhead, and it grows with every new account. 

“The flow of information between our teams is all managed manually. There are definitely gaps and issues that come from that.” — Manufacturer and Merchant 

The gaps are where errors get in. And errors in product data don’t stay contained. 

4. The Problem Often Starts Upstream 

A few businesses flagged something worth noting: their data challenges don’t start with how they manage information internally. They start with what arrives from their own suppliers. 

“The problem often starts before the data even reaches us — our suppliers and factories don’t always have the right information to begin with.” — Building Products Manufacturer 

Manufacturers are where the product data supply chain starts. What they publish to merchants, distributors, catalogues and digital channels depends entirely on what comes in from upstream. When that input is incomplete or inconsistently structured, the correction happens inside the business, manually, before anything can go out. 

5. Regulation is Turning a Nice-to-Have Into a Must-Have  

Compliance came up differently at this year’s show — not as something on the horizon, but as something businesses are dealing with now. The Construction Products Regulation and the incoming Digital Product Passport requirements are creating a new kind of urgency, and most of the businesses we spoke to don’t yet have the data infrastructure to respond comfortably. 

For manufacturers, the dependency is direct. Performance declarations, compliance documentation, sustainability data — all of it sits on having accurate, structured product information in one place. If that data lives across a mix of systems and spreadsheets, meeting the requirements means significant manual effort or accepting real risk. 

Compliance and data management kept coming up as two separate conversations. They’re the same one. 

6. When It Goes Wrong, It Goes Wrong Publicly 

Most data errors surface quietly — a spec that’s slightly out of date, an image that doesn’t match a variant, an attribute missing from a merchant portal. Some surface less quietly. 

“We actually had an incident with incorrect product data going out on the day we spoke to you. It’s not a one-off.” — Building Products Manufacturer 

The last four words are the ones that matter. Incorrect data reaching a merchant or an end customer creates returns, complaints and friction in trading relationships. When it keeps happening, it’s not a one-off. It’s a process problem. 

Final Thought 

What struck us most about InstallerSHOW was how consistently these challenges appeared across businesses that had almost nothing else in common. Small manufacturers and large ones. Businesses with established tools and businesses still running on spreadsheets. Brands managing a few hundred SKUs and groups managing hundreds of thousands. 

The specifics varied. The underlying problem didn’t: product data managed in too many places, by too few people, with too much manual effort holding it all together. 

The businesses getting on top of it aren’t doing anything complicated. They’re bringing their product data into one place, building a process around it, and letting the structure do the work that people were doing before. The ones who’ve done that are moving faster, making fewer errors, and serving their channel partners better. 

Pimberly for Building Materials Manufacturers 

More UK construction businesses choose Pimberly than any other PIM. Find out how we help manufacturers, merchants and bathroom brands manage product information at scale — from structured onboarding and enrichment workflows to multi-channel publishing and automated data sheets.