Rail, construction, home appliances: sectors that seem to have nothing in common have found in GS1 standards a shared infrastructure to exchange their data and gain collective efficiency. At Tech For Industry Show 2026 (Paris Expo Porte de Versailles), a panel brought together Laura Barnac (GS1 France), Patrick Jeantet (French Railway Industries Federation), Ambroise Gékière (Groupe SEB), Rémy Lanois (CERIB, buildingSMART France) and Magdalena Pichowski (buildingSMART International) around one guiding thread: the Digital Product Passport (DPP) and structured product data.

For GS1 France, we are leaving a comfortable "vertical" world, where everyone worked in their own box, for a "horizontal" cross-sector, cross-technology world where each holds only part of the solution. In an environment demanding more efficiency and transparency, smooth processes require working together. GS1 — a non-profit created 50 years ago "by companies for companies," whose famous barcode is scanned 10 billion times a day — helps industries build this common language: identifying, describing and exchanging product data reliably.

GS1's analogy: a standard is like grammar (how to express a common position, in what order to put words), and product data like the words. Together they create a common language — the condition for players to "finally talk to each other."

Patrick Jeantet frames the approach within data strategy: behind data lies AI, and behind AI, the competitiveness of French industrial sectors — with potentially phenomenal productivity gains. The hardest issue remains sharing, in a historically siloed sector.

Initiated by SNCF Voyageurs on rolling stock (2018-2019) and written into the sector contract, the approach led to choosing GS1 after a collective study (SNCF, Alstom and others). The Scan IT app lets each worker scan a part and access its standardized product sheet: identification (a kind of "social security number" for the part), presence or absence of asbestos, intervention history… Today 60% of rolling stock is covered, targeting 100% in 2027. On the infrastructure side, more recent: a supplier — Vossloh Cogifer, via its Outreau foundry — marks its switch crossings in GS1, with sheets shared with SNCF Réseau; ~25% coverage today, aiming for 60% then 100%.

SNCF Voyageurs' rolling-stock engineering estimates the gains from standardized product sheets at €0.5–2M per year (errors avoided, added value recovered). But you must invest upfront — easy for a large SNCF, harder for an SME. Hence the Federation's role: supporting not the Alstoms or SNCFs, but the whole industrial fabric, especially tier 1, 2 and 3 suppliers, in concentric circles — until GS1 becomes a "de facto obligation."

Groupe SEB (Tefal, Rowenta, Krups, Moulinex — €8–8.5B, 400 million products/year, 47 industrial sites) must provide each retailer (Amazon, Carrefour…) with around 140 data points per product: dimensions, weight, visuals, logistics and marketing information. With about one-third catalog renewal per year, this represents 10 million data points to create every year in customers' systems. Yet the small appliance sector has few common standards.

According to cited studies (e.g. McKinsey), complete product data brings around +2% conversion, a considerable revenue gain. Added to this is a regulatory wave to anticipate: DPP (delegated acts expected around 2029-2031), deforestation regulation (EUDR), battery passport… "When you've finished one, you've missed the next": hence the need to structure reliable, shared data upstream. All the more so as agentic AI enters the buying journey: per cited projections, 15% of shopping will be agentic by 2030, and 100% of influence shopping — without structured data, no visibility.

Rémy Lanois (CERIB) describes a highly fragmented industry: depending on their trade, each player describes a structure — and thus its systems and components — differently, hindering a common language. The turning point: the evolution of the Construction Products Regulation (CPR), which incorporates the DPP. Facing a sector that struggles to standardize and an incoming regulation, the answer is to accelerate: first standardize (common languages, interoperability formats, dataspaces), then normalize (converge toward consensus). For construction, it is therefore through regulation that the opportunity to work together arises — and thanks to GS1, there's no need to "start from scratch," reusing standards proven in other industries.

Magdalena Pichowski (buildingSMART International) recalls the effort begun in 2019 with a memorandum of understanding between buildingSMART and GS1, via a "digital supply chain in built environment" working group and several pilots. The finding: BIM (Open BIM / IFC standards) carries design-construction use cases, GS1 traces and identifies the product and its owners — but the data structure was missing, which the DPP now provides. Her view: the DPP is a paradigm shift that turns manufacturers (of windows, insulation…) from mere suppliers into true partners, since they hold and guarantee the reliability of product characteristics.

Asked about AI, Magdalena Pichowski sees it above all as a compliance and regulatory-watch guardian, able to guide choices and data quality — its primary usefulness at this stage.

What strikes Laura Barnac at the end of the discussion: the closeness of the messages across such different sectors (rail, appliances, construction) — all saying, almost in the same words, that product data is essential and the time to act is now — and how concrete the topic is, rooted in companies' daily life. For her, Industry 5.0 comes down to competitiveness: being efficient, high-quality and sustainable — three challenges no company can tackle alone (sustainability, in particular, means nothing without stakeholders). Hence the role of standards, "designed to solve together problems we couldn't solve alone." And a decisive final word: trust. Without trust, no dialogue, no collective, no standard — because a standard isn't applied, it's built together.

What is the Digital Product Passport (DPP)? The DPP is a European regulatory requirement aiming to make a product's data available in a structured, reliable way across its value chain (composition, traceability, sustainability). Its delegated acts are expected gradually around 2029-2031 depending on the sector.

What are GS1 standards for? They are common rules for identifying, describing and reliably exchanging product data between players — a "common language" that structures data and eases regulatory compliance.

What is the value of well-structured product data? In rail, SNCF estimates gains at €0.5–2M/year; in appliances, complete product data reportedly brings around +2% conversion. Beyond that, it prepares companies for upcoming regulations (DPP, deforestation, battery passport).

Why is regulation an opportunity for construction? Because in a highly fragmented sector, the Construction Products Regulation (incorporating the DPP) creates the occasion to standardize and then normalize data exchange, building on proven standards like GS1.

This panel was recorded at Tech For Industry Show 2026, the B2B trade show for industrial transformation (Smart Manufacturing, AI, Supply Chain) at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. Watch the full discussion above, and join us on May 19–20, 2027, Hall 7, for the next edition.