Blog & News

The BMF (Builders Merchants Federation) is the only trade association that represents and protects the interests of builders’ merchants and suppliers to the building materials industry in the UK and Ireland. Members of the BMF can benefit from using an ETIM ready PIM system, to enrich their product information with all the required ETIM class types, features and values, whilst providing a 360-degree overview of their ETIM-enriched data. This is where Proplanet comes in.

As B2B, B2C and online sales platforms become commonplace for manufacturers selling their products, good quality product data is paramount! Without it, your products will not sell or if they do, many will be returned due to the wrong products being purchased because of the lack of product information. If you are looking to structure your product data, the ETIM standard might be the solution for you.

With the introduction of the CCPI in 2022, you as a building manufacturer might now be looking at the requirements for this new construction product information regulation and for systems to manage the additional product information that will be created to comply with CCPI. Here's how the Proplanet PIM can help you with that.

The more SKUs you offer, the harder it gets to manage them all. From providing detailed information about each product’s features and benefits to making sure the pricing and technical specifications are spot-on, at some point it will become difficult or impossible to manage your ranges manually.

Every quarter, our UK partner the Electrical Distributors' Association (EDA) releases a newsletter full of industry news, inspiring stories and tips & tricks on how to make the most of your benefits. In the April edition of their newsletter, they dedicated some attention to our new UK office and our new branding. Here's what the EDA wrote about us!

The Electrical Distributors’ Association (EDA) is the trade association for electrical wholesale distribution in the UK. The EDA supports and represents its wholesaler members in multiple ways, one of which is facilitating the digitalization of the electrotechnical sector. In recent years, as ecommerce began to grow in importance to the sector, the EDA recognized a business-critical need for access to, and the ability to share, enriched high quality and consistent product data at each link in the supply chain.

Proplanet has teamed up with product catalogue experts, Channel Studios, to create a Proplanet PIM module called Autopub & Print. Having your data structured using the Proplanet PIM, it’s an easy step to produce online and offline catalogues.

Do you sell online? And if so, have you considered the importance of up to date, fully-enriched product info?
If not, you should… because your customers won’t buy your products without it! Let’s look at a case in point.

We all know that managing product returns costs time and money. But have you considered the impact on your carbon footprint? Implementing a Product Information Management (PIM) system could help your business cut carbon emissions and boost your bottom line.

James Hargreaves Group was established in 1923 as James Hargreaves (Plumbers Merchants) Ltd. In the decades since, the company has established an enviable reputation based on their commitment to providing excellent service, and supplying only the best quality plumbing, heating and bathroom products from leading global brands.

In today’s fast-moving world, there’s a bigger focus than ever in the manufacturing sector on digitalization and the digital transformation of standalone, offline processes to integrated, cloud-based systems. However, managing large amounts of complex product data in an online environment can be a huge challenge for many organizations.

Classification standards are agreed in construction and installation to make it easier to share information within the chain. For that reason, many companies are preparing to record data in line with ETIM and CCPI standards. Wayne Jarvis, Business Developer at ProPlanet, will present a webinar to help companies with 4 steps to prepare their product information for the implementation of CCPI and ETIM.

Proplanet introduces a new service: Proplanet Academy. With the online training platform, Proplanet helps its customers to get the most out of the PIM system DataProcessor. Users can follow the software training courses when it suits them and at their own pace.

2BA recognizes ProPlanet as a Premium Software Partner by demonstrating that its PIM system DataProcessor meets the three applicable criteria for DICO and BMEcat data exchange. This guarantees that DataProcessor is able to achieve the highest score on the 2BA label data quality. The title is the highest achievable recognition for PIM suppliers in the Netherlands.

Distributors need rich product data to function in a B2B e-commerce environment. The onus is on manufacturers to add information about subjects like logistics, pricing, and warehousing (to name a few). The impulse to ‘just use Excel’ is understandable. But moving to a PIM solution also reduces overhead and errors whilst simultaneously preparing you for BIM and the Code for Construction Product Information (CCPI).

Delivering high quality product information to your customer is an absolute must for online purchases, but producing it is complex and time consuming, unlike buying a product in a store or branch. With Product Information Management (PIM) you can manage, classify, enrich and distribute product information in and from one system. Why you should want this as a manufacturer? Let me explain in the following 5 reasons.

The success of a webshop stands or falls with good product descriptions. The statistics do not lie. Customers want to know what they are buying before they buy. Is a good description missing, or are the specifications not in order? If so, they drop out. And then we haven't mentioned the effect of good descriptions on the search results. But how are you going to realise this if there are 235,845 items in your shop?

High quality product information is the force that drives successful online strategies. Data pools store all relevant product information in one location. Manufacturers and wholesalers utilize these to easily add rich product information to their online stores and e-commerce solutions. A PIM system further increases the efficacy of a data pool. How? Here are 5 ways in which PIM improves the value of data pools.

The need for up-to-date and qualitative product information is growing steadily but at the same time the lifespan of products and their time-to-market is also increasingly getting shorter. As a manufacturer or wholesaler, are you increasingly active online and is ETIM new to you? Then read this blog. I’ll try to explain to you in simple terms what the ETIM classification is, how you can classify your products and how you can then share them in your online channels and with your customers.

ProPlanet appoints Wayne Jarvis as a Business Developer for the UK market. In this new role, he will advise Distributors, Suppliers and Manufactures in the Electrical industry to improve their Product Information management and boost their e-commerce.

"We build simple tools to solve complex problems". This quote certainly applies to Dataprocessor Lite, the newest product from ProPlanet. Data processor Lite was specially developed for manufacturers who use the Excel tools to supply article data to 2ba. In 2 steps, the PIM system DataProcessor Lite, converts article data from Excel into an article file that you can deliver to 2ba. 

Do you use the Excel data delivery tools to deliver article data to 2BA? Then 2019 will be the year for you to switch to PIM.

From a collection of Word and Excel docs, towards a well-organised PIM system, read how Venture Lighting Europe's ETIM-UK work has transformed their product data.

ETIM UK / EDA believes that a PIM system is crucial for proper product data management and therefore developed, together with ProPlanet, a PIM proposition for the members of ETIM UK / EDA.

Recently a number of new online features have been added to DataProcessor TJ. These include new plugins for BMEcat 3.1 and 4 (including maritime fields and ETIM MC), management tools for the ETIM classification, filters and master tables, bulk edit tools and options for adding media files online.

The product data in DataProcessor TJ is now also accessible online via almost all common browsers. Sharing article data with partners in the chain has never been easier. installation of the software is not necessary. Give partners restricted access to the database in DataProcessor TJ via a secure login. They log in online and immediately add their article information online to the database. So no hassle with exchanging files and you all use the same classification.

EDA (Electrical Distributors Association) represents the electrotechnical wholesalers in the United Kingdom. The EDA members together account for about 80% of the industry. On the ETIM UK website, EDA's David Bates (Project Manager ETIM UK) explains the differences between the systems for managing product data (PIM, DAM and MAM) and how they work together.

GS1 Nederland offers a central source to exchange article data in the DIY sector among other things.
In GS1 Data Source, the supplier records product data of her articles in a standardised way so customers have access to this. Besides the ETIM and UNSPSC classifications, the GS1 DIY standard is also supported in DataProcessor TJ.

FESAH looks after the interests of wholesalers in bathroom fixtures and heating techniques in Belgium. FESAH is partly started to streamline the exchange of article information in the branch. Via the FESAH datapool wholesalers and manufacturers can exchange classified and enriched article information. The article information delivered via this FESAH datapool can be imported and exported by default in DataProcessor TJ.

It is not new that different rights can be assigned to different users in EezyBridge. But now different rights per user can be assigned for each collection seperately. This comes in handy when for example different users work for different product lines. Furthermore the number of shown assets per user is limited which makes the visual search easier.

With the dynamic publication ETIM meets the needs of the market for more flexibility in the classification. By anticipating on the next official publication a fast respons to new developments is created.

EezyBridge offers 1 system to search, modify, use, and share digital assets.Would you like to try EezyBridge? Request your free demo version now. The demo version gives 1 user the right to use the basic version of EezyBridge with up to 1 GB storage capacity. After 2 weeks your assets and data will be automatically deleted.

With an FTP client (File Transfer Protocol) you connect to an FTP-server, which enables you to receive files from that server and send files to that server. With the FTP client in EezyBridge you can upload your assets directly and safely from your own browser. Especially when you upload a large amount of assets this comes in very handy and moreover much faster.