An incorrect weight on your website. An outdated item number at a distributor. Or a specification containing a product combination that is no longer correct. Poor product data costs money, but how much?
These costs rarely appear as a separate line in your accounts. They are hidden in time spent searching, corrections, duplicate data management, customer questions and missed opportunities.
A product property changes. Product management updates it, but the same change also needs to be made on the website, in a product sheet, in specification texts and perhaps in a data pool or distributor’s system.
Miss one of those places and the work comes back later. Marketing spots the discrepancy, sales receives a question and the technical department has to determine which information is correct.
The UK’s Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) found that updating product properties from a single source can save at least 50% of the time compared with manual methods.
So the cost is not just in entering product data. It is mainly in repeatedly searching for, checking and correcting the same information.
For a construction product manufacturer, product data is about more than item numbers, weights and dimensions. Knowledge about applications, performance, product combinations and installation is valuable too.
Specifications are a good example. An outdated specification can be reused in another project. An incorrect product combination may therefore remain in circulation much longer than you might expect.
The same applies to a website, product sheet, BIM object or Digital Product Passport. They are different ways of making the same underlying product and application knowledge available. The more places you manage separately, the greater the risk of inconsistencies.
So there is a useful question to ask: how many places do you need to update when a single product property or application changes tomorrow?
Some of the hidden costs are relatively easy to calculate. Suppose marketing, sales, product management and the technical department collectively spend fifteen hours a week searching for, checking, copying and correcting product information.
Based on 46 working weeks and average internal costs of €60 per hour, that amounts to €41,400 per year.
This is not an industry benchmark, just an example. And it does not even include a missed enquiry, an incorrect application or a customer who gives up because essential information is missing.
Good product data management therefore starts with knowing where the correct information is stored, who is responsible for it and how changes reach colleagues, customers and partners throughout the construction chain. With Utopis PIM, you can manage product information centrally and then reuse the same information across different applications and channels.
Instead of repeatedly fixing errors afterwards, you tackle the problem at its source.
Not sure how much time your organisation currently loses searching for, checking and managing the same information in multiple places? A good first step is to map how product information actually flows through your organisation.
With our Strategic Product Information Assessment, we examine your current situation, bottlenecks and ambitions together. This gives you a clearer picture of where improvements can be made and which next steps make sense. Without starting with software.
