Margins are shrinking on material so any unnecessary time spent in your warehouse or not in possession of the customer is a waste of money.   Another growing area of expense is with unnecessary shipping.  One contributing factor to this waste is the disconnect between the Project Management Office and Accounting‘s procurement team.    This disconnect often leads to material being purchased too early on a project or the wrong material being pre-ordered before engineering work is finalized.

These problems can often be corrected with a reallocation of roles between these departments as well as bridging some of the visibility gaps as people examine the operational and financial aspects of a project.

The right tools can allow you to empower the PMO to set required dates on material and create change orders to facilitate material returns or additions to the job.   Purchasing in turn, gets a holistic view of all material demand across all projects for whatever period of time is desired.  This results in material being ordered just in time to be deployed, quick returns of unused material and bulk orders to preferred vendors across projects, all saving precious cash.