The hours your crew loses to material chaos

Skilled electricians cost $75 to $100 an hour fully loaded. Per industry research from ELECTRI International and MCA, Inc., they could spend up to 40% of their time on activities that have nothing to do with installing electrical systems. Not breaks. Not transit. Material handling: ordering, waiting, unloading, sorting, moving materials around to accommodate site conditions, processing returns, dealing with delivery mistakes.

That number (up to 40%) comes from a 2008 study by MCA, Inc. and the University of Michigan Flint, commissioned by ELECTRI International. It's an industry ceiling, not a universal floor. Some crews run tighter than that. But the study didn't invent the problem; it named what field crews already live with on every shift.

The question remains why is that number still accurate nearly two decades later. The tools changed. The catalogs got better. Some contractors moved off spreadsheets. The problem didn't shrink. That's what happens when the fix addresses the symptom but not the structural issues.

Ten categories, not one

Most content on this topic retreats to "procurement delays" and "material inefficiency": vague terms that let everyone agree there's a problem without having to name where it actually lives.

The ELECTRI International / MCA, Inc. research is more precise. It identifies ten discrete categories of material-handling time loss:

Each category absorbs skilled labor. Not all ten hit the same crew on the same day, but across a project lifecycle and a fleet of job sites, the aggregate is where the 40% ceiling comes from.

The value of this taxonomy isn't academic. When you can name the ten categories, you can look at your own job sites and ask which ones are happening right now, and how often, and for how long. "Procurement inefficiency" doesn't give you that. A foreman standing in a staging area trying to figure out if the conduit that arrived is the right size for the third time this week: that's category 8, and it's costing you.

Why the fix can compound the problem

The most common response to material chaos makes it worse. 41% of firms accelerated material purchases after winning contracts, specifically to buffer against delays. The instinct makes sense: if materials won't arrive in time, order early and order more. The problem is that early, excess inventory creates the storage churn, excess movement, and handling loss the ELECTRI / MCA research identifies as direct categories of non-productive time.

The same study that identified the optimal jobsite inventory window (three days of on-site material) explains why over-ordering backfires. Less than three days' worth starves labor productivity. More than three days creates excess movement, storage problems, and loss. The sweet spot is tight by design. Ordering a two-week buffer to feel safe about delivery timing creates the very chaos it was meant to prevent.

This is a structural trap, not a contractor mistake. The conditions that make over-ordering feel rational:unpredictable lead times, supplier reliability variance, schedule compression are real. The behavior that results creates a secondary wave of material-handling loss. The system is producing the outcome; the people inside it are responding logically to the system's incentives.

Where the gap lives

Across the ten categories of material-handling loss, the ordering category is the one where the field-to-office disconnect shows up most clearly.

The way most field ordering still works: a foreman identifies what the crew needs, calls or texts the supplier directly, the office gets a version of that request later (if they get it at all), and the ERP gets updated at AP time when the invoice arrives. The purchasing manager learns what was spent when the bill comes in, not when the order was placed.

That gap isn't a communication problem. It's a systems problem. The ordering workflow was built for a desk: a purchase order form open, a supplier catalog bookmarked, a phone on a landline. It was not built for a foreman wearing work gloves on a job site with inconsistent cell coverage who needs to get something ordered and get back to work.

Jessica Nascusa, senior purchasing agent at Morrow Meadows, described what that gap looks like in practice: "It's kind of like playing telephone. There's a translation issue — they want a certain part, if you don't have those exact numbers, it's sometimes hard to remember everything to give to the vendor, and they're thinking of a different part."

When the system makes ordering harder than calling someone directly, crews revert to the workaround. The workaround creates the gap. The gap creates the chaos. This is the structural failure. The foreman who picked up the phone was working around a broken system.

(Why the workaround keeps winning over the ordering system, and what it takes to change that pattern, is its own conversation. The adoption side of field technology is worth a separate look; it's a root-cause question this piece doesn't go into but is addressed in this blog here.

What the time costs

The cost framing on material handling stays abstract. "Lost productivity" and "inefficiency costs billions" don't translate to the job-level decisions a foreman or PM is making on Tuesday.

The PlanGrid/FMI research (2018) found that 35% of construction professional time goes to non-optimal activities, including 5.5 hours a week spent searching for product data alone, not installing, not planning, not supervising. The ELECTRI / MCA figure puts the ceiling on the electrical-specific version of the same pattern.

Run that math on a mid-market electrical contractor with ten job sites and four-person crews. If each crew absorbs three to four hours per day in material-handling activity that isn't installation, the weekly aggregate isn't a rounding error. It's a line item that doesn't appear on any cost report because no one captures it as a category. The labor cost stays in the budget. The productivity output doesn't show up in the work.

What recovery looks like at the job level

Guarantee Electrical runs a $200M material operation with two purchasers. "We started paying more attention to how we handle materials when we discovered that 40% of people's time is all about material management." Their purchasing team handles 120 purchase orders a day, not by adding headcount, but because the system connecting field requests to purchasing decisions changed. When the field communicates what they need precisely, in a format that purchasing can act on without clarification calls, the purchasing team's capacity expands without headcount growth.

"We would not be able to do that with just two purchasers alone, without Remarcable. That's not possible." (Guarantee Electrical)

Two purchasers, 120 POs a day: that's a capacity multiplier. The foreman's request reaches purchasing complete and unambiguous. Purchasing cuts the PO. The crew gets what they ordered.

For Collins Electrical, the procurement cycle ran 2 to 3 hours per order before. Field supervisors were spending half their mornings chasing order statuses, time that should have gone to running the job. With a connected field-to-purchasing workflow, that cycle dropped from hours to minutes. The case study is worth reading if you want the specifics: field-to-purchasing time cut from hours to minutes.

The pattern across both companies is the same: the field order reaches purchasing with enough information to act on it. The gap that produced the chaos closes. Crews spend more time installing and less time handling, waiting, and chasing.

The systems argument

The foreman who calls the supplier directly instead of using the ordering system isn't trying to be difficult; the system makes ordering harder than the workaround. The purchasing manager who learns what was spent at AP time isn't failing to communicate; there was no channel that captured the information in real time.

The ten categories of material-handling loss in the ELECTRI / MCA research don't go away because someone tries harder. They go away when the system connecting the field needs to purchasing decisions closes the gap that produces them.

The recovery mechanism is field-native ordering: crews can submit requests from any job site, in the language they actually use, with visual catalog support that converts field terminology to correct part numbers without a translation layer. The system has to work on a phone, without reliable connectivity, for someone who isn't going to stop what they're doing to navigate a desktop procurement portal. When ordering is as natural as a phone call, the workaround stops winning.

According to Remarcable’s ROI survey data, field staff save an average of 4.9 hours a day when field ordering works the way field crews work: the measurable delta between two versions of the same job.

The time is already in the budget. The question is whether the system captures it as productive work or absorbs it as material chaos.

If your crews are absorbing hours in material handling that doesn't show up on any cost report, see how field-native ordering changes that.

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