MEP Special Event Replays & Resources

Contractor product selection on the job has a different look and feel in this digital era—a shift that could leave some manufacturers scrambling to get noticed, build, and maintain critical relationships with their buyers.

What used to be a simple, albeit manual, connection between manufacturers, distributors, and project estimators is now a multi-layered supply chain workflow that includes digital tools and resources heavily influencing contractor product selection.

Tracking digital product utilization, maximizing product placement opportunities, and managing market share becomes more complex when the decision makers span the entire pre-construction workflow.

Three top opportunities manufacturers now have in light of expanding digitization in the construction industry include:

#1: Going beyond E-catalogs:

Your primary audience has expanded beyond just purchasing departments, where enhanced CAD/BIM e-catalogs traditionally have worked well. The industry is changing due to the adoption of technology across the design and construction workflow–opening the door to multiple decision-makers on a project. Now, the best way to get your products specified on projects is to make them easily accessible at each pre-construction stage.  

But how do you ensure products are front-and-center to the right decision makers at the right time in this evolving supply chain? Manufacturers must reach estimators, detailers, and other key pre-construction personnel in addition to procurement specialists to ensure product procurement and customer loyalty.

#2: Greater customer insights:

The ability to translate customer demand and habits into strategic advantage in this emerging digital workflow is more complex, but with that complexity comes a higher potential for return. 

Traditional channels do not provide deep customer insight nor do they compile the data that drives intelligence about product utilization, performance against other manufacturers, pricing and market share, and actionable intel for growth. Digital engagement by contractors with your digital products has created a data trail that can now be used for powerful analytical insights.

#3: An adapting (and increasingly connected) customer base: 

To further add to the emerging opportunities, the supply chain has become more focused on digitization and customer experience as opposed to competing strictly on price (though price is of course still a factor).  The consequence of this is a mandate for manufacturers and distributors to better serve their customers across their pre-construction journey in order to gain and keep your customers’ business.

So how do you continue to connect with your increasingly connected customer base? The simple answer is to take a digital dive into the construction ecosystem.  

Trimble is now making this possible with our new Construction Analytics platform that aggregates information across the entire pre-construction ecosystem and draws on Trimble’s deep domain expertise in the pre-construction workflow. Trimble provides a library of 10+ million digital MEP manufacturer components to users when estimating, quoting, and modeling, and more. In turn, tens of thousands of contractor users are using digital manufacturer content on the Trimble platform to perform their pre-construction activities and ultimately make purchasing decisions on each project.

Construction Analytics is able to capture critical insights from these digital pre-construction workflows to help manufacturers make informed decisions about critical business drivers like sales and marketing investments, R&D, and pricing triggers.  

Within the application, manufacturers can measure how they are performing against their competition week-over-week, by product or geography–and ultimately see key analytics to help get in front of contractors in the time and space where they are making decisions that impact final procurement.  In the construction space, there is considerable truth to the adage “what gets drawn, get purchased.”

Learn more about what you can do in the Construction Analytics platform and how this (free) tool can provide value to your organization.