If you work in manufacturing, you already know the grind: dozens—sometimes hundreds—of SKUs, each needing technical data, compliant documentation, and marketing-ready content. And if your team is still managing product info in spreadsheets or static PDFs? You’re burning time, budget, and probably patience.
Let’s talk about something that’s costing mid-sized manufacturers upwards of £100,000 a year: manually producing product sheets.
How to Save £100k a Year on Product Sheets (Without Cutting Corners)
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Why Is This Still a Problem in 2025?
Most industrial manufacturers have invested in ERPs. But ERP for industrial businesses wasn’t designed to manage product content. It stores data, sure—but it doesn’t deliver the content your customers, sales reps, or distributors need in a structured, easy-to-use way.
Here’s what typically happens:
- Tech specs are scattered across emails, PDFs, and engineering tools.
- Marketing formats every product sheet by hand—over and over.
- Teams go through five, ten, even fifteen revisions just to sign off one product.
- Launches get delayed, and your best engineers are stuck copy-pasting.
This is where digitising product data in manufacturing goes from nice-to-have to mission critical.
The Business Case for Change
When you add it all up—labour costs, revision cycles, missed launch windows—it’s not surprising that many manufacturers spend six figures annually just creating and maintaining sheets.
We’ve seen teams lose 50+ hours a week managing product data manually.
Even worse? All that effort still leads to:
- Inconsistent product specs
- Compliance gaps
- Errors in distributor listings
- Sales delays due to “missing” content
It’s not a people problem. It’s a systems problem.
What Modern Manufacturers Are Doing Differently
Leading companies are adopting product information management for manufacturers to solve this. The goal isn’t just to save time—it’s to standardize, streamline, and scale your content production across SKUs and product families.
With a centralised product data system—also known as a PIM—you can:
- Store specs, images, PDFs, and attributes in one place
- Reuse product content across channels and regions
- Cut time spent per sheet from hours to minutes
- Eliminate errors caused by “version sprawl”
What is PIM for Industrial Components?
PIM for industrial components is built to handle complexity: configurable products, variant families, regional compliance attributes, and high volumes of SKUs.
It works like this:
- You define your product schema once (attributes, families, templates)
- You enrich data in bulk—at product and variant levels
- You automatically generate data sheets with consistent formatting
- You push structured content out to eCommerce platforms, ERP, or distributors
It’s not a fancy database. It’s the system that glues your entire go-to-market process together.
Automating Data Sheet Creation: The Big Win
Let’s zoom in on one high-impact area: automated data sheet creation.
Modern PIM systems allow you to:
- Build reusable templates per product category
- Auto-fill sheets with approved product attributes
- Export sheets in branded, PDF-ready formats
- Integrate with tools like BigCommerce or Salesforce for real-time sync
Some companies now create thousands of sheets a year—without touching InDesign or Excel.
Your Next Step
If you’re still producing product sheets manually, it’s time to stop. The future is about digitising product data in manufacturing, aligning teams around centralised product data, and using PIM to drive content consistency at scale.
You don’t need more staff. You need a better system.