The Untapped Opportunity of Supply Chain Insights
Volatility across the construction industry over the last three years has caused many builders to feel out of control and out of solutions. Supply chain challenges have been particularly pervasive, severely limiting the available pool of subbies and pushing up labour costs to record highs.
Whilst main contractors can’t directly solve the tense supply chain market themselves, they can implement practical solutions, like measuring supply chain insights, to protect their own operations and ongoing financial sustainability.
What are supply chain insights?
Supply chain insights, in procurement terms, are valuable, measurable pieces of supply chain chain data that can be tracked across the procurement process. This data can include trends, patterns, historical information, risks or opportunities within the supply chain.
Key supply chain insights leading builders are tracking:
- Vendor history and workload
- Estimating trends
- Purchasing opportunities
- Staff workload
- Lead time risk
- Cost escalation
Typically, supply chain insights are overlooked or not measured properly, meaning that construction teams have rarely had access to this valuable information and have been ‘flying blind’ when making critical procurement decisions.
Let’s take a deeper look at why actively and effectively measuring supply chain insights is so important for main contractors.
Why supply chain insights are important
Profitability: Supply chain insights can be used to identify purchasing opportunities and other capabilities, resulting in cost savings and efficiencies across the procurement process. Decisions can also be made much faster using supply chain data, saving on labour costs.
Visibility: Supply chain insights provide main contractors with access to subcontractor histories and workloads, potential lead time risks, at-risk contracts, purchasing opportunities, and more. Each of these insights paints a clear picture of procurement status, leaving no room for excuses or the potential overlooking of critical issues.
Consistency & Control: Capturing gap and mistake-free supply chain data vastly reduces the potential of risks and ensures that the supply chain is managed to the highest possible standard. This results in the saving of countless hours if an issue were to arise and peace of mind, no more second guessing whether you’ve made the right decision.
Performance: Accessing accurate, meaningful insights enables main contractors to operate strategically and proactively, with a focus on driving success across the supply chain.
Why aren’t supply chain insights the norm?
You might be thinking, “If supply chain insights are so powerful, why isn’t everyone using them?”. Put simply, the capturing, tracking, handling and evaluation of this information is a very arduous task if done manually. It would be near impossible to have someone monitoring and inputting data 24/7 and would also leave the data prone to human-error.
You might now be thinking, “Then how are other construction companies capturing this information?”. Top main contractors have data-capturing and evaluation, with the help of specialised software, embedded in their ongoing operations. They let technology handle all the time and effort-intensive tasks, so they can focus on strategic, meaningful decision-making.
The wider construction industry as a whole is now moving towards embracing technology and data as a means for gaining control, security and ensuring growth.
Free eGuide: 6 Supply Chain insights driving profits in procurement
Learn more about the 6 supply chain insights that are driving profitability for main contractors. Read first-hand about the impact each of these insights are having on leading construction teams, projects and businesses and how companies are accessing them.
Get the eGuide
ProcurePro