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. Below are the pain points we see again and again in the sector.
Version drift: four versions of the same datasheet
Product information lives scattered across Excel files, shared folders and mailboxes. The datasheet on the website differs from the one in the dealer portal, which differs again from the PDF a salesperson forwarded last month. Nobody knows which version is the right one anymore. For technical construction 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 datasheets. That file then sits on a shared drive or SharePoint, opens slowly, and the result still doesn’t look professional. Expensive time, a mediocre result, and a process that does not scale.
Compliance risk without an audit trail
CE marking, declarations of performance and EN standards must be correct and demonstrable. Anyone keeping that in separate documents has no trace of who changed what and when. Just as the new European Construction Products Regulation tightens and mandates environmental data, that lack of control becomes a real problem.
Slow publishing to every channel
Today, a change to a product must go manually to the webshop, the dealer portal and the PDF datasheets. In multiple languages. Over and over again. That not only costs time, it also introduces errors and means channels are never fully in sync.
Varying supplier data
Distributors receive product info in all forms: a neat Excel from one supplier, a ZIP with PDFs from another, sometimes nothing at all. Normalising, completing and translating that data is a recurring chore that rarely happens centrally anywhere.
Knowledge stuck with one person
Often the entire product data process depends on one or two people who know how it works. If that person leaves, the process grinds to a halt. There is no system that holds the knowledge.
The common thread: there is no single source of truth
All these pain points have the same cause: there is no central, structured source where product data is correct and 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.
Curious how much time you could concretely win back? Request a demo with your own products.