5 Signs It’s Time for a PIM (Construction Edition)

In the building materials world, your product range isn’t just broad—it’s deep. Cement isn’t just cement. You’ve got different bag sizes, compressive strengths, curing times. And that’s just one category.

As your product range grows, and your customers expect more from your digital channels, you reach a point where the old ways of managing product information just can’t keep up.

So how do you know when it’s time to move beyond spreadsheets, shared drives, and copy-pasting supplier PDFs?

Here are five signs it might be time to invest in a Product Information Management (PIM) solution—once your data is in decent shape.

You’re managing product content in 10 different places

If your team is jumping between Excel, your ERP, cloud folders, email, and your website CMS just to launch or update a product—you’re losing time and risking mistakes.

And when one system gets out of sync, that’s when incorrect specs, wrong images, and compliance issues sneak through. That hurts trust—and sales.

Your suppliers all send you data in different formats

One sends a spreadsheet. Another sends PDFs. A third emails product info in the body of the message. Your team is stuck translating chaos into structure—manually.

If you’re wasting time trying to turn that mess into clean, usable product content, it’s a sign you’ve outgrown manual onboarding.

But here’s the catch—a PIM alone won’t solve this. Most PIM systems aren’t built to manage supplier data collection. What you actually need is a supplier portal or onboarding tool—like @SKULaunch — to structure the intake and validation process before it ever hits your PIM.

That way, your team can spend less time chasing data, and more time enriching it.

Your website says “Coming soon” more often than it should

Whether you’re building out a new category or launching supplier products, delays are often caused by one thing: not having the content ready.

When you’re launching SKUs without images, specs, or supporting documents just to “get them live,” that’s a red flag. You’re showing up online half-dressed—and customers notice.

You can’t confidently reuse product data across channels

If the info on your website doesn’t match what’s in your print catalogue… or your reps are quoting off a spec sheet that’s two years old… it means your data isn’t centralised or trustworthy.

You should be able to manage product content once—and push it everywhere: website, brochures, customer portals, internal tools.

Your team is constantly firefighting instead of scaling

If your product, marketing, or ecommerce team is flat out just keeping things accurate and up to date, you’re not leaving any time to grow your product range, improve UX, or test new sales strategies.

You’ve hit the point where better tools aren’t a luxury—they’re a necessity.

But don’t start with the system

Before diving into a PIM platform, take a step back. A system alone won’t fix messy or missing product content. Make sure you have:

A clear view of your current product data health
A plan to enrich and standardise attributes across categories
A lightweight process for gathering and maintaining content

A PIM can absolutely help—but only when your foundation is solid.

Recognise these signs in your own business?

We help construction and building supplies companies get their product data ready—so when they do invest in PIM, it actually delivers.

Book a data review call to see where you’re at and what to prioritise next.

5 Signs It’s Time for a PIM (Construction Edition)

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