For a manufacturer or distributor of construction materials, the technical datasheet is the product’s business card. Specifiers, contractors and dealers make decisions based on it. And it is precisely those datasheets that are often the biggest source of lost time and errors.
The problem with datasheets in Word and Excel
A construction product datasheet contains dozens of data points: dimensions, performance values, application areas, standard references and CE documentation. Once those live in separate Word and Excel files, version drift is inevitable. The datasheet on the website differs from the one in the dealer portal, which differs again from the PDF in a colleague’s mailbox.
We see it often: a product manager, sometimes at director level, spends hours each week in an Excel template composing datasheets. The file sits on a shared drive or SharePoint, opens slowly, and the result still doesn’t look professional. Expensive time, a mediocre result, and no guarantee whatsoever that the values are correct.
For construction products that is no small matter. A wrong performance value or an expired declaration of performance can cost a tender, or worse, create a liability problem.
Without a PIM
- Four versions of the same datasheet
- Standards in separate documents
- Every language updated separately
- No audit trail at inspection
With PimLayer
- One source, identical everywhere
- Standards linked to the product
- All languages in one workflow
- Complete version history
One data model, built for construction products
In PimLayer you define per product family which attributes are mandatory: tensile strength, fire class, thermal conductivity, application area. Variants inherit that structure via the inheritance principle, so a series of a hundred dimensions stays consistent without a hundred manual copies.
- Structured attributes with units and validation
- Variants and families with value inheritance
- CE marking, declaration of performance and EN standards linked to the product
- Automatic saving and logging of every change
Print-ready datasheets, automatic and multilingual
This is where the biggest time gain sits. PimLayer generates commercial and technical datasheets as print-ready PDFs, on the fly, in multiple languages and even with a different logo per market or brand. One source, and from it the right, compliant datasheet rolls out automatically for every language and every channel.
What used to cost hours of manual work and endless version control becomes a matter of a few clicks, each time correct and professional.
Publishing to every channel
The same source also feeds your webshop, dealer portal and marketplaces, via a connector or the open API. If you change a value, the change appears everywhere and in all languages at once. No more manual copy work.
Want to see what your own datasheets would look like? Request a demo with your products.
Source: Construction Products Regulation (EU) 2024/3110 (EUR-Lex).