Ask a manufacturer or distributor of construction materials where most time is lost, and the answer is rarely about the product itself. It is about the data around it: the datasheets, the standards, the variants, the languages, the channels.
Version drift: four versions of the same datasheet
Product information lives scattered across Excel files, shared folders and mailboxes. The sheet on the website differs from the one in the dealer portal, which differs again from the PDF a salesperson sent last month. Nobody knows which version is correct anymore. For technical products, where a single performance value counts, that is a real risk.
Hours of manual work on datasheets
Creating a product datasheet is still manual work in many companies. We see situations where a product manager, sometimes at director level, spends hours each week in an Excel template composing sheets. That file then sits on a shared drive or SharePoint, opens slowly, and the result still doesn’t look professional.
Compliance risk without an audit trail
CE marking, declarations of performance and EN standards must be correct and demonstrable. Keeping that in separate documents leaves no trace of who changed what and when. Just as the new European regulation tightens and mandates environmental data, that lack of control becomes a real problem.
Slow publishing to every channel
A change must go manually to the webshop, the dealer portal and the PDF sheets. In multiple languages. It costs time and introduces errors.
The common thread: there is no single source of truth
All these pain points share one cause: there is no central, structured source from which everything flows automatically. That is exactly what a PIM brings. PimLayer is built for it, sized for the mid-market: powerful enough for complex construction data, simple enough to go live fast, with onboarding included and local service in Dutch and French.