26 Hours a Week: The Real Cost of Poor Construction Product Data

Ask a builders’ merchant or a building materials manufacturer what construction product data costs their business. Most cannot give you a figure. The work is real, but it spreads across buyers, category managers, e-commerce teams and IT. It never appears as a line on anyone’s P&L.

It looks like someone chasing a supplier for a datasheet. Or re-keying 45 columns of a spreadsheet into three different systems. Or checking whether the dimensions on the website match the ones on the packaging.

New independent research puts a number on it. MRA Research surveyed 80 senior decision-makers at UK builders’ merchants and building materials manufacturers, all at businesses turning over at least £25 million. On average, their businesses lose 26 hours every week managing and fixing product data.

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.

What 26 hours actually looks like

The average holds up under inspection. More than half of respondents (56%) sit in the 21-to-40-hour band. This is not a handful of extreme cases pulling a mean upwards.

Merchants lose more than manufacturers, at around 29 hours a week against 24. That fits a business model built on reconciling data from dozens of suppliers rather than owning one range.

The split by function is the more interesting one. Commercial respondents report around 30 hours a week; IT and technology respondents report 24. The people closest to the revenue see more of this cost than the people who usually have to fix it.

One caveat, because the research states it plainly: this is the time respondents are aware of. Nobody counts the product data work that slipped into someone’s normal week years ago. The true figure is more likely to be higher than lower. Martin Balaam makes the same point in episode one of our podcast, where he calls the 26 hours “just the tip of the manual iceberg”.

Put a cost against it and the scale becomes easier to take to a board. Advertised salaries for product data, PIM and data analyst roles sit at or above the UK median. Add employer National Insurance, pension and overheads, and a fully loaded cost of £30 to £40 an hour is realistic. Twenty-six hours a week, over a year, comes to £40,000 to £55,000. That is roughly the full cost of one employee, spent entirely on construction product data.

That is not an argument for cutting a role. The business already pays for that time. It could go into onboarding ranges faster, serving customers better and getting products live sooner.

Businesses that have restructured how they hold product data are already recovering it. Jamie Johnson, Senior Merchandising & Pricing Manager (Traders Division) at IronmongeryDirect, told the research:

“Since structuring our data correctly within a PIM, we’ve saved probably 10 hours a week across different departments. The difference a structure makes is huge. If I want to update all of the values for a particular attribute, this can be exported, amended in Excel and re-uploaded in a matter of minutes vs a couple of hours previously. If we prefer (and we’re updating attributes to the same value), we can also bulk update attributes across thousands of products at a time, directly in the PIM all at once. Having this work in a really simple way, means that we can launch to market quicker (resulting in less lost sales) and can update values quickly ensuring customers have the most up-to-date information.”

Jamie Johnson, Senior Merchandising & Pricing Manager (Traders Division), IronmongeryDirect

The cost does not stop at time

If the 26 hours were the whole story, this would be an efficiency question. It isn’t. The research asked what businesses had actually experienced as a result of poor product data:

• 34% have lost or missed sales as a direct result
• 43% have seen errors in orders, fulfilment or returns
• 45% report inconsistent product information across channels
• 41% report poor customer experience
• 31% have had product launches delayed
• 48% cite challenges managing supplier data

The interviews make the mechanism plain. A branch manager and buyer at a merchant put it simply:

“If the information’s that poor, I won’t even list it on the website.”

Branch Manager/Buyer, merchant

The product exists and the stock exists. The sale does not happen, because nobody trusts the data enough to publish it. Delayed launches work the same way. Miss the window and, as one manufacturer’s compliance manager described it, you might wait another six months for the next one.

Why construction product data goes wrong in the first place

92% of respondents face at least one product data challenge. Only 30% manage product data centrally, while 68% run it across several systems. That is the root of it.

The challenges people named follow directly from that fragmentation:

• Maintaining up-to-date information (60%)
• Data stored across multiple systems (58%)
• Integrating supplier data (51%)
• A lack of internal ownership or governance (39%)

An operations director at a plumbing and heating distributor described the third one:

“If you send me a spreadsheet with 45 columns, six go into one system, six into another, eight into another; you then have to cut them down, put them into another spreadsheet, import them, and do the same with the next one.”

Operations Director, plumbing & heating distributor

Every one of those handoffs can introduce an error. Someone else finds that error later, usually after a customer has seen it.

Cleaner inputs alone will not give the hours back

The instinct is to fix the input: get better data in from suppliers in the first place. Shared industry data sources help here. They provide a clean, accredited manufacturer baseline for the suppliers they cover. They also remove some of the chase for spreadsheets.

But the 26 hours do not sit at the front of the flow. They sit in the work that comes after the data arrives: structuring it, enriching it for the customer who is actually buying, and governing who can change what. Then comes distribution, to the website, the branch, the trade counter, the marketplaces and the customer portals.

56% still name sharing product data with customers and partners as a challenge. No shared source does that work for you. A pool also reaches only part of your supplier base. The rest still sends whatever shape suits them.

A commercial problem managed as a technical one

One finding explains why this persists. Construction product data sits with the Data/IT team in 45% of businesses. Just 10% put it with commercial teams and 5% with e-commerce or digital.

Not a single respondent reported no clear owner, so somebody owns the data. Businesses simply own it as a technical task rather than a commercial one. That is how a revenue problem ends up on an IT ticket.

John Godwin, Co-Founder of The Journey, made the point directly in the report:

“In most cases we see product data stalls because nobody owns it. It sits between commercial and e-commerce, so it defaults to IT and stops being a commercial decision. Name a commercial owner first, and the return case tends to build itself.”

John Godwin, Co-Founder, The Journey

What reclaiming the time takes

The businesses furthest ahead in this research have organised around the same few things. Every supplier gets one route in and one specification to meet, instead of a chase for spreadsheets by email. Product content speaks to the buyer rather than the database. One record per product feeds every channel in the shape that channel needs. A named owner signs off before anything goes live. And compliance falls out of well-managed product data instead of running as a separate project.

That is what a PIM platform is for. It gives a business a central source of truth for construction product data to own, enrich, govern and distribute from. Publish once, distribute everywhere.

It is also where the 26 hours go back. What a business then does with that time is the point. Tim Brennan, Digital Director at Wolseley, put it this way in the report:

“Establishing higher product data standards takes real effort, but the payoff for our customers is massive. Wolseley have invested heavily recently in our product data systems and processes and transformed how we operate. This has allowed us to repurpose time once utilised purely for data collection, into building richer, more seamless and data inspired experiences. Product data management is no longer just a necessary administrative task, it’s part of our commercial engine driving our brand and shaping our customer propositions.”

Tim Brennan, Digital Director, Wolseley