When you’re running an industrial manufacturing company, ‘time is money,’ but not only. It’s also your market share, strict compliance with regulations, directives, and laws, and, not least, the trust you build with your customers. You’re in the business of selling
high-spec, specialised, and often big-ticket items. Your customers need to be fully informed and in a digital economy, they rely completely on the product data you provide.
However, many industrial manufacturers are still onboarding supplier product data the old-fashioned way: Copy/pasting specs from PDFs, chasing down missing spreadsheets, or manually keying attributes into ERPs. At small scale, this cobbled together process limps along somehow. However, when operating at industrial scale, with thousands of SKUs, multiple product variants, and constant supplier updates, manual onboarding isn’t feasible – it gets buried under an avalanche of incoming data.
Wrangling incoming product data manually isn’t just inefficient. It creates errors, bottlenecks, and compliance risks which directly impact revenue but also reputation. In this sector, delays and mistakes can cost millions. Below, we go into more detail on the fallout caused by manual onboarding, before providing you with the solutions you need to eliminate this drag on productivity, profitability, and longer-term growth.
The hidden cost of manual onboarding
Sadly, it’s “business as usual” as your people plough through spreadsheets and email threads. This endless cycle comes with costs:
- Wasted time and resources: Key personnel are forced to spend weeks reformatting supplier files instead of focusing on what they’re actually paid to do, such as innovate, strategise, or create new opportunities for enhancing customer engagement. That’s an opportunity cost.
- Error-prone processes: Manual data entry inevitably means mistakes are made – from missing dimensions to incorrect compliance codes. Down the value chain, these errors cascade into costly returns, disputes with customers, or even cause safety issues around non-compliance.
- Bottlenecks at launch: Every correction and re-check pushes back product go-live dates. Industry analyst, Gartner, reports that only 55% of product launches happen when scheduled, with poor data quality as a leading cause of the other 45%.
- Non-compliance risk: In heavily regulated industries like HVAC, power transmission, and electrical supply, inaccurate data can lead to failed audits, legal fines, or blocked access to markets such as the EU (RoHS/REACH compliance).
The overall results of all these pain points are:
- Higher operating costs
- Delayed (or lost) revenue
- Reputational damage
It’s unviable for any industrial manufacturer to continue this practice in today’s digital ecosystem.
The problem of scale: Complexity, suppliers, and SKUs
The industrial sector brings its own particular challenges that make manual onboarding not just sluggish but impossible to scale:
- Massive volumes of SKUs: Industrial manufacturers often manage 10,000+ SKUs, many of which consist of multiple variants for size, material, voltage, or compliance rating. Manual onboarding cannot keep up.
- Diverse suppliers: A manufacturer can easily use hundreds of suppliers, all delivering data in inconsistent formats – PDFs, Excel sheets, Word docs, or even embedded in an email text. Furthermore, they use their own terminology, column headers, and attribute structures. That’s a lot of corrections!
- Complex product attributes: Industrial products frequently require detailed technical data. It could be CAD files, performance specs, safety certifications, or installation manuals. One missing data field can stall procurement, or worse, erode a purchaser’s trust in your credibility as a vendor.
- Siloed data: If, for instance, your procurement, engineering, compliance, and marketing departments are working in disconnected systems, there’s no ‘single source of truth’ regarding the product data they’re working with. That turns version control into a never-ending nightmare.
- Ongoing updates: Product data isn’t static. Suppliers are constantly revising specs, safety standards evolve, and regulatory requirements keep changing. Updating all these changes manually makes it practically impossible to maintain consistent information across the board, not to mention accuracy or version control.
What might work for a dozen SKUs turns into wading through mud when multiplied by thousands. Those manufacturers still clinging to manual onboarding run the constant risk of chronic delays, a fragmented and poor-quality digital presence, and a lack of competitiveness.
Smarter alternatives: structured, scalable onboarding
The good news is that forward-looking manufacturers are tackling these challenges head on, using technology-enabled processes which replace re-keying and firefighting with automation, integration, and robust data governance.
1. Structured onboarding platforms
A versatile tool like SKU Launch standardises how your suppliers deliver product data. Vendors access clear templates and mandatory fields which match with your taxonomy. Automated validation catches missing or mis-formatted attributes before they enter your systems. Instead of chasing down suppliers by email, you can be sure you’re receiving clean, complete, correct, and consistent data from the get-go.
2. Centralised product information management
A Product Information Management (PIM) or Product Experience Management (PXM) system becomes the ‘single source of truth.’ It centralises every attribute, spec, and digital asset, and eliminates silos, so all teams know they’re working from the same data version. Straightforward integrations with your ERP, CRM, and distributor platforms enable a seamless flow of product information across the enterprise.
3. Automated attribute mapping and validation
Machine learning matches supplier attributes to your internal taxonomy automatically, eliminating hours of manual mapping. Real-time validation rules enforce governance. So, for example, no SKU goes live without a compliance certificate or high-resolution image, avoiding the need for costly reworkings downstream.
4. AI-powered enrichment
AI tools accelerate repetitive enrichment tasks. They’re capable of:
- Creating first-draft product descriptions
- Extracting attributes from PDFs or images
- Tagging images with alt text
- Generating SEO-friendly titles
Don’t worry – humans are a key part of the process too! They review, refine, and add the nuances of brand and context to product content, conjuring the ideal combination of efficiency and quality.
5. Compliance by design
You cannot leave regulations such as OSHA, RoHS, and ISO to chance . Automated workflows enforce compliance checks at the point of data entry. A SKU cannot progress until certifications, safety details, and environmental standards are correctly populated.
6. Predictive analytics and continuous improvement
With centralised and enriched data, manufacturers can leverage predictive insights for forecasting SKU demand, identifying underperforming products, and improving supply chain resilience. Corrections and updates feed back into AI systems, making them smarter, and reducing errors over time.
The business gains
Eliminating manual onboarding and replacing it with structured, automated processes transforms business performance:
- Time-to-market: Launch cycles shrink from weeks to days, enabling faster response to customer demand and seasonal or campaign-driven spikes in demand.
- Data quality: Consistency across channels enhances customer satisfaction and trust, reduces returns rates, and safeguards compliance.
- Productivity: Highly skilled teams are freed from the burden of remedying bad or missing data so they can focus on innovation, supplier strategy, and growth.
- Cost savings: Automation reduces processing costs by up to 25% and eliminates expensive reworkings.
- Scalability: Adding new suppliers, products, or attributes becomes a scalable routine, not a bottleneck.
If you’re a manufacturer managing thousands of SKUs across global supply chains, this foundational shift isn’t just operational ‘housekeeping.’ It’s a driver of competitive advantage.
Final thoughts: Time to put manual onboarding out to pasture
The industrial manufacturing sector has already entered an era of infinite product variety, rapid innovation cycles, and a tightening of compliance demands. Manual onboarding, with all its inherent pain points simply can’t keep pace with these changes.
The manufacturers that thrive will be those who treat product data as a strategic asset, rather than as an afterthought. Investments in structured onboarding platforms, centralised PIM/PXM systems, and AI-powered enrichment, will provide a substantial ROI, while building and consolidating the foundations for accuracy, agility, and growth.
Manual onboarding is yesterday’s method. Scalable, automated onboarding is the future. Let’s talk today about how we at Start with Data can help you to replace a sluggish and error-strewn system of manual onboarding with the fast, scalable, and automated processes which will make you truly competitive in an ever more crowded marketplace.