Product information isn't paperwork. It's your route to market.
A specifier is finishing a specification on a Thursday evening. She needs acoustic performance data for a product like yours. Your website has a brochure. The number is on page 47 of a technical PDF. That PDF was superseded eighteen months ago and nobody took it down. The manufacturer's declaration lives somewhere else entirely.
She has ten minutes. She moves on.
You will never know this happened. There is no lost-lead notification in your CRM. Nobody rings to tell you your competitor got specified.
Hotel? Trivago.
Last week I sat in on the first welcome forum for the Manufacturers' Information Hub. The MIH is a manufacturer-owned not-for-profit building a single gateway for construction product information, so that one connection replaces the dozens most manufacturers currently maintain.
The analogy they use is travel. A hotel doesn't build a separate link to Booking.com, Expedia and Trivago. It connects once into shared distribution infrastructure and everyone else pulls from that.
Someone in the forum asked whether this replaces NBS. Alex Small, who leads the project, was clear that it doesn't. The hub would feed platforms like NBS rather than compete with them, so a specification tool pulls current manufacturer data straight through instead of chasing spreadsheets to get products onboarded. I spent long enough at NBS and the National BIM Library to know how much of that chasing there is.
Construction is less elegant than travel. A spreadsheet for one customer, somebody else's template for a contractor, a PDF for the architect, product data in NBS, BIM objects on a library, a bespoke request from a consultant, and the version technical actually trusts sitting in a system nobody else can reach. Same product, same information, seven destinations, seven versions.
Alex told a story about Kier at HMP Full Sutton. RFID chips on precast elements, scanned on arrival, pulled straight into the models and the planning tools. It worked beautifully. It also took four months to build the digital link between two companies' systems, for one product, from one supplier, on one project. Scale that to hundreds of suppliers and thousands of products.
When the MIH asked the room what word came to mind when they heard "construction product information", 31 people answered. Trust and golden thread were in there. So were mess, messy, complicated, urgent and needs coordination.
It's a good idea. It's also 2029.
The MIH roadmap runs a proof of concept and minimum viable product this year, pilots next year, a regional sandbox in 2028, and full deployment in 2029. There is nothing to buy yet and nothing to join beyond a mailing list.
So this isn't a piece about getting ready for the MIH.
What occurred to me listening to the forum wasn't the technology. It was how much of this is a commercial problem wearing an IT costume.
Your product information is part of the route to market now
NBS's 2025 Digital Construction Report found 42.5% of respondents already using AI tools, with another 37.7% planning to within five years. The single most common use, at 71.1%, was searching for technical information. Two thirds of that sample work in design and specification. These are the people who write your product into a spec, and most of them are using ChatGPT.
Alex raised the same point himself, from the manufacturer's side: when configuration platforms are running on AI, how does the AI know where to go for accurate, trusted performance data?
It doesn't. It finds what's findable. Sometimes that's yours. Sometimes it's three versions of yours and it picks one. Sometimes it’s your competitors.
Nobody owns this
Technical owns the test data. Compliance owns the certificates. Marketing owns the website. Sales owns the relationship. IT owns whatever system holds the data. And someone in technical has a spreadsheet nobody else knows about.
The same NBS report found 28.6% of suppliers use a product information management system, barely moved since 2023. More telling: 18.4% didn't know whether their own organisation had one.
Regulation will force the issue eventually. The Construction Products Reform White Paper, published in February, proposes that product information be available digitally in interoperable formats, with the general safety requirement due to be legislated by the end of this year and implemented in late 2027. The EU's revised Construction Products Regulation has been in force since January 2025.
But you don't need a deadline to justify asking five questions.
Who is responsible for the accuracy of our product information? Not who produces it. Who is accountable for it.
Where is the definitive version?
How many places do we maintain the same information? Website, brochures, NBS, BIM objects, distributor portals, EPD databases, customer spreadsheets. Count them.
How long does it actually take technical to answer a routine data request?
What does an architect find when they search for our flagship product? And what does ChatGPT say when you ask it to recommend one?
That last one isn't a gimmick. It's the cheapest way to find out whether the information you've put into the world makes sense to someone who doesn't work for you.
Making product information available isn't the same as making a product easy to choose. That part is still marketing, and it's still yours.
If you're a manufacturer and you can't answer these question on that list, that's worth a conversation. clare@clarewatson.uk.