Monsoon Continues Its Builders Merchants Federation (BMF) Membership
Continuing our support for the UK and Ireland’s building materials and construction sector, and helping members move forward on B2B commerce.
Monsoon Software Consulting (UK) Limited is a Service Member of the Builders Merchants Federation (BMF), an ongoing partnership that continues into 2026-2027. It’s a relationship we’ve valued for years, and one that keeps us close to an industry we know well.
About the BMF
The BMF is the trade association for the building materials sector across the UK and Ireland. More than 1,000 businesses are members, from national builders’ merchants to independent suppliers. Together they account for over £52 billion in turnover and employ more than 200,000 people. The BMF speaks up for the sector with government, runs training to build skills across the industry, and brings people together through its forums, working groups and events.
Our membership keeps us part of that community and close to the people shaping where building materials supply goes next.
Helping BMF members on their B2B commerce journey
Monsoon has spent 20 years building digital commerce for B2B and B2C businesses, including a good deal of work in the construction and building products space. Over that time, we’ve seen how much the right technology changes the way merchants and suppliers sell, look after their customers, and run things day to day.
That experience is also what led us to build Apex B2B, and to build an ecosystem around it.
Introducing Apex B2B
Apex B2B is our B2B commerce platform for builders’ merchants: a viable alternative for merchants weighing up their options, designed around trade buying and the realities of the sector rather than adapted from general retail.
But we know a commerce platform on its own rarely solves the whole problem, and that is exactly why we didn’t stop at the platform.
Why the partnership, not just a platform
Getting B2B commerce right in this sector is really three connected challenges, not one. Merchants need accurate, well-structured product information. That information has to sit on top of clean, centralised master data. And all of it needs to connect back to the ERP and systems the business already runs. Usually these jobs are handled by different tools and different suppliers that were never built to work together, so the merchant ends up owning the integration, chasing mismatched data, and carrying the risk when the pieces don’t line up.
No single product fixes that, because each of us only covers one link in the same chain. Master data on its own doesn’t sell anything. A PIM needs good source data feeding it and somewhere to publish to. A commerce platform is only as good as the product information behind it. That is why Apex B2B, ETIMIX (a fellow BMF service member) and DataYard came together: our strengths are complementary, and joined up they cover the whole journey instead of a slice of it.
How the ecosystem works
Rather than three separate products, merchants get one connected flow, from raw data through to the storefront their customers use.
DataYard sets the foundation, bringing business and product data into a single, reliable source of truth and connecting it to the merchant’s ERP. ETIMIX takes that data and turns it into rich, structured, sales-ready product information through its PIM. Apex B2B then publishes it into a live B2B commerce experience built for trade buyers. Because the connections between these steps are built into the solution rather than left to the merchant, data moves cleanly from one stage to the next without the usual gaps and manual rework.
The result is a single, coordinated ecosystem for BMF members: one integrated solution to plan, one team to work with, and one path from data to sale, instead of a stack of disconnected tools the merchant has to hold together.
Talk to us
If you’re a builders’ merchant thinking about B2B commerce, we’d be glad to talk. Whether you start with your product data, your PIM or the storefront itself, the ecosystem is designed to fit together from day one. Get in touch with the Monsoon team to see how Apex B2B, ETIMIX and DataYard work as one.
