Material buying pulls in two directions. Buy early and you protect the programme but tie up cash and risk spoilage. Buy late and you free cash but risk stopping the job. Getting it right is less about predicting prices than about knowing your own programme.
Cement: the material that punishes early buying
Cement has a shelf life, and in a humid climate a short one. Bags stored badly harden, and even bags that look fine lose strength over time. Buying three months of cement to beat a price rise usually means paying for material that no longer performs.
Buy cement against the pour programme, in quantities that clear within weeks rather than months. If storage is unavoidable:
- Off the floor on pallets or timbers, never directly on a slab
- Away from external walls, covered, in a dry and ventilated store
- Stacked no higher than the supplier recommends, so lower bags do not compact
- Issued strictly first in, first out, with the oldest at the front
That last rule is where most stores fail: new deliveries land in front of old stock because it is easier, and the old bags harden at the back.
Steel: the material that ties up cash
Reinforcement does not spoil the way cement does, so the constraint is different — it is cash and space. A large early order commits money that the project may need elsewhere, and bar stacked on site for months gets damaged, contaminated and pilfered.
Order steel by structural element against the programme: foundations, then columns to first floor, then the first suspended slab. Each order is sized to a phase you can actually see starting. Where the schedule is settled, cut-and-bent steel delivered to a bar bending schedule reduces waste and site labour, though it demands drawings that are genuinely final.
Work out the reorder point rather than guessing
For anything consumed continuously, the reorder point is simple arithmetic: how much you use per day, multiplied by how long the supplier takes to deliver, plus a buffer for the days that go wrong.
If you use 40 bags a day and the supplier takes three days, you reorder at 120 bags plus buffer — not when the store looks empty. Written on the bin card, this removes the single most common cause of a stoppage, which is nobody noticing until it is too late.
Price movement: hedge with terms, not with volume
The instinct when prices rise is to buy more. For perishable or bulky materials that instinct is expensive. Better tools:
- Fixed-price supply agreements for a defined period and volume, so you get price certainty without taking delivery early
- Call-off orders — price agreed now, delivered in instalments as the programme needs them
- Fluctuation clauses in the main contract, so genuine market movement is shared rather than absorbed
Call-off arrangements are the most underused. They give the price protection of a bulk order without the storage, spoilage and cash consequences of one.
Count what you have, honestly
Procurement decisions made against a stock figure nobody has verified are guesses. A short physical count of key materials each week, reconciled against the register, is enough — and the first count on a site that has never done one is usually a surprise in both directions.
Losses show up as a gap between issued and consumed. Materials with high resale value walk off sites everywhere; the control is not suspicion, it is a locked store, a named storekeeper, and requisitions signed for.
Tie procurement to the look-ahead
The three-week look-ahead is also the buying list. Each week, read forward: what activities start in the next three weeks, what do they need, what has a lead time longer than that window, and what must therefore be ordered today?
Run that way, procurement stops being reactive. The question in the weekly meeting shifts from what have we run out of? to what does week three need us to order now? — and that shift is worth more than any price you will negotiate.
