IN Brief:
- GS1 UK and Barbour ABI estimate poor product information costs construction up to £3.8bn annually.
- Fragmented records contribute to manual checking, rework, delays, and uncertain product substitutions.
- Building Safety Act duties are increasing demand for structured and traceable information.
GS1 UK and Barbour ABI have estimated that fragmented and inconsistent construction-product information could be costing the UK industry as much as £3.8bn each year.
The research connects weak information management with repeated manual checking, delayed procurement, rework, uncertain substitutions, and difficulties transferring accurate records between manufacturers, distributors, designers, contractors, and asset owners.
More than half of the construction professionals surveyed identified inadequate digitalisation as a source of inefficiency. Product data frequently remains divided between PDFs, technical sheets, spreadsheets, emails, portals, specification systems, and internal databases that use different naming and classification structures.
As a product moves through the supply chain, those differences become harder to reconcile. Manufacturers may hold current performance, certification, maintenance, and traceability information, while designers, merchants, subcontractors, and principal contractors retain separate versions.
Changes made during procurement or construction do not always flow back into the project record, leaving estimators to confirm basic dimensions, procurement teams to compare incomplete technical information, and site teams to work from documents that may no longer describe the product delivered.
Substitution creates a particularly sensitive point of failure. A proposed replacement may appear similar in cost and general function while differing in fire, acoustic, structural, durability, environmental, installation, or maintenance performance.
Without structured information, technical assessment becomes a manual exercise carried out under programme pressure. Approval can then depend on staff locating the right certification, checking its scope, confirming compatibility with adjoining products, and recording why the substitution was accepted.
Building Safety Act duties have raised the consequences of weak information control. Higher-risk building dutyholders must maintain a dependable evidence trail covering design decisions, product selection, changes, installation, and handover, with incomplete or inconsistent product records undermining the golden thread.
The £3.8bn estimate also exposes a wider productivity problem. Construction has invested heavily in modelling, coordination, planning, and field technology, yet many workflows still begin with somebody searching for the latest document and checking whether it describes the product actually procured.
Digital platforms cannot correct that weakness when the underlying information lacks common identifiers, ownership, or update processes. A new interface can reproduce the same fragmented records unless manufacturers and project teams agree how products are named, classified, versioned, and connected with physical assets.
GS1 standards use persistent identifiers so that products, locations, and logistics units can be recognised across different organisations and software systems. Construction adoption has developed more slowly than in retail, healthcare, and food, partly because building products are often configured, combined, or installed within larger systems.
That complexity increases the need for traceability. A façade, fire door, ceiling, roofing build-up, or M&E installation can contain products from several manufacturers, each carrying separate certification, batch information, approved applications, and installation requirements.
The project record must therefore show more than the identity of an individual component. It also needs to explain how products were combined, where they were installed, whether the arrangement matched the approved design, and how subsequent changes were authorised.
Gateway 2 has already increased the amount of coordinated technical information required before construction begins on higher-risk buildings. Better-defined client requirements and earlier technical coordination are becoming central to approval because unresolved specifications and poorly controlled changes prevent a design from being assessed as a coherent whole.
Manufacturers face a growing data burden as environmental product declarations, embodied-carbon figures, responsible-sourcing evidence, digital product passports, maintenance information, and end-of-life requirements become more prominent. Reissuing that information through inconsistent documents creates cost for the manufacturer and for every business that subsequently interprets it.
Structured information can shorten comparison, reduce duplicated entry, support more accurate quantities, strengthen warranty records, and improve the transfer of operating and maintenance data. It can also make substitutions faster by exposing technical differences before products reach site.
Responsibility remains distributed across the project team. Manufacturers control source data, specifiers define requirements, contractors manage procurement and change, installers create site records, and clients inherit the completed asset.
No single software purchase can resolve a process in which those roles remain unclear. The necessary improvement combines interoperable standards with disciplined information ownership from specification through procurement, installation, commissioning, handover, and operation.
The estimated annual loss gives financial weight to an issue often treated as administration. Product information now influences cost, programme, safety, carbon reporting, quality, and long-term asset management, making its accuracy part of construction delivery rather than a record assembled after the building is complete.
