by Serguey Shinder
In March 2026 a contractor we supply in Dublin sent us a questionnaire for a public housing scheme. Most of it was familiar. One section was not. For every product on the order, it asked for the declared performance, the manufacturer's identifier and the production batch of the units actually delivered to site, in a form their own systems could read, and a link to where that information would still be available in twenty years.
We could answer roughly a third of it. Our product pages had a document attached for most lines, usually a PDF of the manufacturer's declaration, and when we checked, a fair number were older versions than the products we were now selling. As for batches, we had never recorded them. Our warehouse scans a product code when an order is picked. Which batch of insulation board or which production run of fixings left our building was written on the packaging and then thrown away by the customer.
That questionnaire was early, but it is not going to be unusual. The European rules for construction products were rewritten in 2024, and among other things they make room for a digital product passport: structured information about a product that follows it through its life, from manufacturer to site to eventual demolition. The requirements are being written product family by product family, so the dates are not settled. The direction is. Large buyers are already asking for the information before any rule obliges them to, because they would rather build the habit than retrofit it.
For a distributor, the uncomfortable part is that we sit in the middle. Manufacturers will hold the passport data. Customers will want it for the exact items they received. The one link between those two things is the moment we pick a box off a shelf, and that is precisely the moment our systems treated every box of the same product as identical.
So we have started on the part that does not depend on how the rules turn out. Pickers in two of our warehouses now scan the batch or lot code as well as the product code, which our handhelds could always do and nobody had asked them to. We store each manufacturer's own product identifier against our lines and link to the manufacturer's published data rather than copying their documents onto our site, so what we show cannot drift out of date. And for every delivery, we keep a record of which documents applied on that date.
It added about four seconds to each pick. The contractor's questionnaire, when the next one came in June, took an afternoon instead of three weeks.
Customers used to ask us what we had sold them. Increasingly they are going to ask which one.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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