Streamlining Construction Procurement: Strategies for Effective Material Management

• Having a procurement plan
• Building a procurement schedule
• Job delivery
• Job material movement 
• and management
• Returns
• Lessons learned and post-mortem

Recognizing what’s involved in material management will allow your team to work on tasks where they can excel. Per Step 1 in the PoP, it’s also important to consider asking your vendor partners to support you. The key isn’t in the labor rate; it’s in the productive installation hours of the highly skilled employee. Both employees will work all day and will work hard; however, you’ll gain minimal revenue and billing from a lesser-skilled person moving material in contrast to what you can achieve by having the highly skilled electrician complete installation tasks.

Highly trained and highly experienced electricians don’t want to spend their days moving material; they want to be doing electrical work. Build on/accelerate the support of your highly skilled labor doing what they’re best at, love to do, and are trained for! Keeping your teams working on installation is key.

Should we buy more often?

The simple answer is no! To reduce material management/handling on job sites, focus on ordering materials that you need now. While electrical distributors are happy to take your order and are likely to even deliver it to you daily, this isn’t the most efficient process for specialty trade contractors. MCA’s research shows that about three days’ worth of material on the job site is the “right” amount. Frequent deliveries can slow you down. They create constant disruptions from unloading, sorting, checking, and staging.

Why? Because, as you know, job sites and job progress are constantly changing in the construction industry. No matter how hard we try, we can’t always do everything that we plan each day, not for the whole job and not even for a week or two in advance. In fact, MCA’s research has shown that having less than three days’ material available for installation leaves you with no ability to adjust to changes in today’s conditions.
If you have too little material, then simple redirection starves the labor and reduces productivity. Having material on site too early equates to having too much inventory on the job site. Too much inventory needs to be moved, counted, monitored, and often repaired or replaced. The answer is three days, because three days is about as far ahead as the job conditions are predictable.

Years ago, “just-in-time inventory” was a big craze. The principles and concepts are still with us today, and continue to expand to provide more cost-effective and productivity-supporting material management and logistics practices. The concept is simple; it’s based on the Toyota Production System, translated to construction, that to work, you need to have the materials required, when and where the installation is to occur, but not more than that — not more and not less. Not way before and not after you need it. MCA Inc’s previous EC&M article (November 2024) "Best Practices for Getting Material as Needed" is a great reference with a material ordering checklist and some thoughts around getting material from your vendors.

Can prefabrication impact material management?

You could use kitted prefab solutions, so everything shows up exactly when and how you need it, ready to install with no extra steps. Additionally, you could work with a partner to provide procurement assistance to enhance productivity, ensuring that materials are ordered and delivered in the most efficient manner possible.

It’s important to be more expansive and think beyond prefabrication. This could lead to benefits such as:

• Increased safety, reliability, and predictability
• Controlled environment
• Buffer for labor allocation (can do things in parallel vs. in series on the job site)
• Can reduce project duration.
• Get more work in the long run.

Using the eight steps in the PoP in the Figure and interconnecting information within your company with an easy system allows you to reduce risk and keep your employees focused on labor productivity. As discussed at the start, it requires planning the work, managing the labor, procuring materials, managing subcontractors, and confirming you have the right equipment and tools while negotiating between other trades and typically working with the general contractor or construction manager to negotiate the schedule and hit the dates required. To reduce time and cost spent on material management/handling, it’s important to:

• Segregate the on-site electrical work based on experience.
• Optimize orders and deliveries to every three days.
• Use a checklist to get your material as you need it by working with your vendor partners.
• Externalize work as much as possible.

It’s really about making a plan and working with your team and the supply chain to have the right people doing what they do best.