Our Catalog is undergoing continuous improvement with updates and new functions being added over the next few months. In the near term, you will notice that there are duplicate entries. This is a result of persistent issues in the industry and we have solutions!
WHAT IS THE ISSUE? Certifications all define “product” differently. They are not actually products, but partial information related to products or parts of products. Certifications also don’t share any information in common – even manufacturer and product names vary across different certifications. This makes it very difficult to align data or merge certifications into one view. You might find 52 EPDs that relate to a part of one product (like carpet backing) while another certification has a single certification for that complete product, carpet tile. There is no standardization for product data or its structure yet in this industry, so matching, merging information and deduplication is extremely complicated. We have a solution for this and we are working on it, but when you search the catalog right now, you will see duplicate products.
DUPLICATE ENTRIES: When manufacturers use BuildingEase Data Exchange Services, we can easily create elegant, merged data in a single view. If we only have certifications without data from the manufacturers, you see duplicates in the catalog. For example, a carpet tile may show up 3 times; once because it has an HPD, twice because it has an EPD and a third time because it has C2C certification. We know that this is not ideal – but the great news is – when we implement our matching/dedupe protocol, we already designed our system to automatically “back-merge” all items that you have added to your Material Lists and you won’t lose any information! If you chose a carpet tile because the owner required an HPD, you will suddenly see that its EPD and C2C certification data also appears in the same detailed view of this product.
If you want to add certification documents (PDFs) to a PDP (Product Detail Page) you can – but the details from those certifications won’t show up in your Material List ‘table headers’ or be usable in different ways.
