Contractors spend 60-70% of their revenue buying materials; it is easily the largest expenditure item in the budget.

Managing your materials effectively will most likely improve the profitability of your construction business.

However, one of the obstacles to increasing your profitability is when the total cost of the material exceeds the budget. Some of the common causes of ineffective material management are:

• Poor planning and control of materials

• Lack of data visibility

• Surplus or lack of materials

• Materials arriving to the site at the wrong time or in the wrong quantity

• Material specifications do not match

• Re-handling and inadequate storage cause losses in labour productivity

These errors can be traced back to simple human errors such as forgetting to order materials or incorrectly ordering the items.

While the error seems small when viewed individually, the effects of these errors do add up, and may end up costing your project millions of ringgit in revenue.

In fact, your construction team can spend up to 20% of their time hunting materials and tracking purchase orders.

These problems can be resolved with digital procurement software, like Speedbrick COMPOSE, that helps you to digitise and digitalise the entire procurement cycle.

When you have all your stakeholders on board on a common digital procurement platform, you stand to enjoy the following benefits on top of managing your materials better:

1. Store all purchasing data on one platform Never lose a document again. Find your documents easily when you need them.

2. Increase accountability The platform records all performed activities, thus providing sufficient audit trail that will enable you to track who did what

3. Prevent spending mistakes With AI processing, you can easily identify and receive alerts on potential spending mistakes, so the software’s intelligent capabilities guide your business decisions.

4. Have Full Visibility on Your Suppliers’ Performance At a glance, know how your suppliers perform, especially their reliability by delivering your materials on time or correctly.

5. Work from anywhere Without the need for paper/physical documents, your team can work anywhere on the digital platform and still be productive.

Users of Speedbrick COMPOSE reported the following results after using it, and we are confident that you will experience similarly, as well:

• Increased productivity by 8-12%

• Reduced material cost

• Improved handling of material

• Reduced double or multiple orders

• Reduced storage of material at site

• Improved quality control

• Improved cash flow