Phone and email ordering persists in construction for rational reasons. Here's what it actually costs, why it works until it doesn't,
Construction field studies consistently find that 30 to 50 percent of labor time goes to non-value-adding activities: material handling, waiting, rework, and logistics. Not installation. Not billable work.
Guarantee Electric quantified this for their own operation. "We started paying more attention to how we handle materials when we discovered that 40% of people's time is all about material management," a team member explained. At typical labor rates, that translates to tens of thousands of dollars per worker per year in productivity that never reaches the job.
Yet most contractors still order materials by phone and email. The question worth examining isn't why they should switch to software. Everyone knows that pitch. The question is why manual processes persist despite obvious costs.
Before examining why phone and email ordering continues, it helps to trace how the process typically works.
A foreman identifies a material need on the job site. They text or call the project manager, who forwards the request to purchasing. Purchasing calls the supplier. Information passes through at least three people before an order gets placed.
Each handoff introduces translation risk. The foreman knows what they need but may not know the part number. Purchasing knows the part number but not the job site context. The supplier knows their catalog but not what the foreman actually meant by "the good couplings."
"Traditionally, we would export out of our estimating system into an Excel spreadsheet and then email that out to our suppliers," a team member at Guarantee Electric described. The spreadsheet becomes the source of truth, updated manually after each transaction, with version control that amounts to hoping everyone's looking at the same file.
"If I would have to call, give that job number, wait for a PO to come through, order my stuff, and then the next job would come in and I'd have to do the same process over and over," described a project manager at Guarantee Electric.
The process works. It just works slowly, with errors that compound.
Phone and email ordering persists because it represents rational decisions, not ignorance.
Relationships carry real value. When a foreman calls a familiar supplier, decades of context travel through that conversation. The supplier knows the account. They know that "the standard boxes" means a specific manufacturer. They know which substitutions are acceptable and which aren't. Software doesn't know any of that.
Ambiguity requires conversation. Some questions can't be answered by a catalog. Will this panel fit the existing enclosure? Is the spec sheet accurate for this application? What's actually in stock at the local branch, not the system inventory? Phone calls handle uncertainty that databases cannot.
Email creates a paper trail. Forward to accounting. CC the project manager. Reply-all when dates slip. The system is messy, but the documentation is accessible without training.
Portal fatigue is real. "A lot of distributors want you to use their portal and place your orders through their portal," noted a project manager at Lighthouse Electric. "And then you go to another distributor, a different portal. You're now trying to learn two, three systems."
Contractors working with multiple suppliers face a choice: learn several ordering systems, or use the universal interface everyone already knows. The phone works with every supplier.
Phone and email ordering works until it doesn't. The breaking points follow predictable patterns.
Growth thresholds. The purchasing coordinator who handles everything at $5 million in revenue becomes a bottleneck at $20 million, when order volume outpaces human capacity and materials start arriving at wrong sites while invoices pile up without matching POs.
Key person dependency. The coordinator who holds the system together through institutional knowledge eventually leaves. The relationships, the pricing history, the vendor preferences, the undocumented processes; they walk out with that person. What was contained chaos becomes visible chaos.
Invoice leakage. "We would spot check invoices to make sure that pricing was appropriate," recalled a manager at Guarantee Electric. "With the amount of material we buy, we can only spot check a very small percentage of that. So it wasn't a good reflection, it wasn't a good check and balance."
Without systematic verification, contractors pay the invoiced price. Whether it matches the quoted price is anyone's guess on volume.
Duplicate orders. When the field can't see what's already been ordered, they submit requests for materials already in the pipeline. Purchasing processes the duplicate because they don't catch it, two invoices arrive, and budget tracking shows overruns weeks after the money was already spent.
Most procurement platforms were designed for office environments. Desktop interfaces assuming stable wifi, full keyboards, and users with time to navigate menus.
Field workers already know how to order things online, doing it daily for personal purchases. The gap wasn't capability; it was software that didn't match how construction actually works.
The foreman doesn't think in manufacturer SKUs. They think in what the thing looks like and what they call it. Systems that require translating field language into part numbers recreate the same translation problem that phone calls have.
The contractors who successfully switch describe the shift in operational terms.
"Now I can just go onto the computer, do all the jobs at one time with a couple clicks, and then I am finished with all that. Instead of making several different phone calls," described a team member at Guarantee Electric.
"Now we don't have to do that," the Guarantee team explained regarding invoice verification. "That is all done automatically. And if someone committed to a price to us, they're held at that price, and if we don't receive that price, we're alerted to it."
The scale changes too. "Yesterday we had 135 orders, 120 orders on the 14th. We would not be able to do that with just two purchasers alone, without Remarcable. That's not possible," noted a manager at Guarantee Electric.
"Rolling out software for the guys in the field is a big deal," acknowledged a manager at Guarantee Electric. "It's usually a challenge if they have to learn something new."
The difference with procurement platforms built for construction is interface familiarity. "If you can use Amazon, you can use Remarcable," one contractor summarized. When the interface matches what field workers already use in their personal lives, adoption stops being a training problem. Instead of weeks of resistance, contractors describe foremen who "just started pushing buttons and fell in love with it."
The visual catalog matters here. A foreman browsing pictures to find what they need isn't learning a new system; they're shopping the way they already know how.
Contractors don't switch because software is exciting. They switch because they need to grow without proportionally growing the chaos.
The manual processes that worked at one scale become constraints at the next, the key person dependency that was manageable becomes an unacceptable risk, and the invoice discrepancies that were absorbed become material to margins.
"Remarcable makes us a better company," the team at Guarantee Electric concluded.
The phone and email processes persist because they work, until they don't. Recognizing the breaking point is easier than predicting it.
Electrical contractors evaluating procurement approaches can request a guided demo to see how material management works in practice.
