Why material procurement is construction’s hidden productivity killer

Ask a project executive where productivity slips away and you’ll hear familiar culprits: labor shortages, change orders, and weather. But if you trace most schedule slips back to their first domino, you land on materials: the way they’re specified, sourced, approved, shipped, received, and staged. Material procurement is the quiet system underneath every job. When that system is slow, noisy, or opaque, crews wait, sequencing unravels, and the budget leaks, often without a single headline event to blame.

Eric Helitzer

The urgency is real. Even as other sectors find efficiency gains, construction productivity remains stubbornly flat, putting pressure on owners and contractors to deliver more with the same headcount. Recent analysis underscores that productivity improvements are now a necessity, not a luxury, as costs and constraints persist.  In the United States, official measures were updated through 2023, providing a clearer picture of where output per hour in key construction industries actually stands and how little slack remains in current practices.

So why do materials hold so much sway over productivity? Because procurement governs time and certainty, the two currencies that determine whether crews are doing direct work or stuck in pre-work and rework. Three frictions, in particular, make procurement a hidden productivity killer.

1) Administrative drag: submittals, RFIs, and approvals

Procurement is not a single transaction; it’s a chain of dependencies that begins in design and runs to the workface. Every RFI that lingers, every submittal that ping-pongs, and every ambiguous spec that spawns an “equal” request steals days from the schedule and fragments labor into short bursts of non-productive activity.

The magnitude is no longer anecdotal. Industry guidance and platform analytics show that RFI response times are a pressure point, with widely observed averages hovering in the week-plus range; even big-platform best-practice content today treats double-digit day counts as common enough to merit formal dashboards and targets. While the exact number varies by project type and contract terms, the pattern is consistent: slow information flow at the front end idles craft labor downstream.

2) Market volatility that planning doesn’t absorb

Contractors have grown savvier about hedging, alternates, and escalation, but materials still move. Producer price indices for construction materials show that after the extreme spikes of 2021–2022, volatility hasn’t vanished; it’s become episodic: pockets of rapid movement (metals, mechanicals) appear against a flatter backdrop. That “episodic” profile is visible in the Construction Materials price index series through July 2025 and in trade association roll-ups tracking inputs to construction.  When procurement plans don’t explicitly capture lead-time variance and price bands and align them to the master schedule, field teams absorb the shock as out-of-sequence work, expediting fees, or both.

3) Fragmentation that turns into waste

Procurement touches design, estimating, project management, field supervision, accounting, and vendors, yet too often each works from its own list, spec, or spreadsheet. The operational cost is obvious; the environmental footprint is, too. In the EU, construction generated 38.4% of all waste in 2022, a stark indicator of over-ordering, damage, storage loss, and end-of-job surplus alongside demolition debris. Reducing that waste requires tighter material control and feedback loops, not just better dumpsters.

Peer-reviewed research in 2024 reinforces what practitioners feel: material management practices (planning, supply, logistics, transport, stock, and waste control) have a statistically significant effect on project performance. Put plainly, the way you run materials is the way your project runs.

Treat materials like a production system, not a paperwork trail

The firms that make visible productivity gains don’t start with a shiny tool; they start by re-engineering flow and then using technology to make that flow measurable and predictable. Four pragmatic shifts can pay back quickly:

1) Put a procurement schedule on equal footing with the master schedule

Build a living log for every long-lead and approval-sensitive item: spec/section, submittal due date, decision service level agreement (SLA), fabrication duration, ship date, on-site date, receiving/inspection window, and “kit-complete” milestone. Modern platforms now expose RFI and submittal response times as first-class metrics; treat them as such, with visible dashboards and accountabilities.

2) Standardize your language—catalogs, alternates, and data

A core catalog for the top 100–200 recurring items (with approved alternates and linked submittals) eliminates many late “equals,” shortens approvals, and reduces duplicate POs. The research case for standardization and disciplined material management is strong and recent.

3) Measure what crews actually do

Track a simple set: percent of tasks started with kit-complete materials, PO-to-dock lead time, RFI/submittal cycle time, and receiving first-time-quality. These are the levers that increase direct work and shrink travel/wait/material-handling time, regardless of the software you use. Contemporary guidance from major platforms exists precisely to help teams baseline and improve these times.

4) Plan logistics like a factory

Sequence deliveries to match look-ahead plans; laydown plans to prevent double-handling and damage; pre-book crane/hoist windows for arriving loads. With price and availability swinging selectively rather than universally in 2025, a constraint-aware logistics plan beats blanket “just-in-time” dogma.

Why this matters now

Two realities make procurement reform the fastest route to productivity:

• Macro productivity hasn’t rescued construction. Despite economy-wide gains in 2025, construction hasn’t enjoyed a comparable surge, and official U.S. measures now track the sector in more detail through 2023, clarity that should sharpen operational targets at the firm and project level.
   
• Costs have cooled, not normalized. Both U.S. and Canadian indicators suggest stabilization rather than a return to pre-2020 conditions; episodic spikes still emerge, and elevated baselines persist. That’s when precise procurement, approvals on time, alternates pre-cleared, logistics synchronized translates most directly into fewer idle hours and fewer change-driven detours.  

A 30-day reset:

• Week 1: Build a living log for every long-lead and approval-sensitive item: spec/section, submittal due date, decision SLA, fabrication duration, ship date, on-site date, receiving/inspection window, and “kit-complete” milestone. Modern platforms can automate reminders, expose RFI and submittal response times as first-class metrics, and make accountability visible across the team.
• Week 2: Standardize your language catalogs, alternates, and data: A core catalog for the top 100–200 recurring items (with approved alternates and linked submittals) eliminates many late “equals,” shortens approvals, and reduces duplicate POs. Digitized catalogs and shared data libraries make standardization stick, ensuring every stakeholder pulls from the same source of truth.
• Week 3: Measure what crews actually do: Track a simple set: percent of tasks started with kit-complete materials, PO-to-dock lead time, RFI/submittal cycle time, and receiving first-time-quality. These are the levers that increase direct work and shrink travel/wait/material-handling time. Software converts manual logs into real-time dashboards, flags outliers automatically, and keeps progress transparent for field and office alike.
• Week 4:  Plan logistics like a factory: Sequence deliveries to match look-ahead plans; laydown plans to prevent double-handling and damage; pre-book crane/hoist windows for arriving loads. Technology helps here too, integrating schedules, shipment tracking, and site logistics into one flow so deliveries sync with crews instead of surprising them.

None of this requires a moonshot. It requires recognizing that procurement is not back-office, it’s the production system for your project. When you make it visible and predictable, you don’t just cut days; you compound them across every trade and every floor.

SC
MR