Neeral Shah, founder and CEO, YardLink, argues that construction needs to adapt more quickly to digital transformation and outlines the role data can play in deciding where to get suppliers from
Ask any experienced project manager how they choose a supplier, and they’ll usually give you the same answer. You go with who you know.
Who answered the phone last time. Who turned up when they said they would. After enough years in the industry, you build a mental map of the suppliers you trust and the ones you avoid, and that map becomes one of the most valuable things you carry with your hard hat.
This is not a criticism. In an industry built on tight deadlines, thin margins and very little room for error, working with people you trust is a rational response to real risk. When a machine fails to arrive on a Monday morning, and your crew is standing idle, the last thing you want is to discover that the supplier you tried for the first time last week has gone quiet on the phone.
But this model has a problem, and it is worth being honest about what it costs.
Procurement is a closed system
Relationship-based procurement is, by its nature, a closed system. It rewards familiarity over performance. A supplier in the market for twenty years who knows the right people will consistently win work over a newer supplier who might be faster, cheaper, and more reliable but hasn’t yet had the chance to prove it. The contractor loses out on potentially better service. The newer supplier cannot break through. And nobody in the chain has an objective way to know whether their choice was right.
This runs deeper than supplier selection. When procurement decisions are driven by instinct and habit rather than data, it becomes hard to spot patterns. Which suppliers are consistently late? Which categories of equipment are generating the most failed deliveries? Which sites are experiencing the most disruption and why? These are questions that experienced procurement teams often have strong gut feelings about but very limited hard evidence for.
Building costs are rising, but output is falling
The market context makes this more urgent than it has been in some time. Building costs across the UK are 3.8% higher than a year earlier, driven by material cost pressures, with energy-intensive products and long supply routes particularly vulnerable to further disruption.
The Construction Products Association has revised its forecast for construction output growth from positive to a 3.3% fall in 2026. At the same time, insolvency risk within the supply chain is rising, with small and medium-sized contractors and suppliers tied to fixed-price contracts amid sharply fluctuating costs.
In this environment, every avoidable failure carries a cost that contractors cannot afford to absorb. Rising fuel costs and global shipping delays are already stretching supply chains and compressing on-site margins for error. A failed delivery that might have been manageable when conditions were more forgiving becomes a serious problem when they are not. The harder question, which the industry rarely asks, is whether the supplier that let a site down last month was chosen based on the best available evidence or simply on the strength of a long-standing relationship.
Digital transformation in construction has tended to focus on the visible and the dramatic, like autonomous machinery, drone surveying, generative design tools, and AI assistants for project scheduling.
These developments are exciting, and the industry is right to pay attention. But the part of construction that stands to benefit most immediately from better data use is procurement, which happens before a single piece of equipment arrives on site.
What does data-driven procurement look like?
What does data-driven procurement actually look like in practice? At its most basic, it means replacing gut feel and institutional memory with a continuous, objective record of supplier performance. Not a one-off audit or an annual review. A live, dynamic picture of how every supplier on your network is performing, updated with every order, every delivery, every collection. One that distinguishes between supplier-caused failures and those caused by other factors, so the assessment is fair and accurate.
This kind of system does not replace relationships. It makes them more robust. When a contractor has both the long-standing trust in a supplier and objective evidence that the supplier’s performance backs that trust up, they can commit to that relationship with real confidence rather than relying on instinct alone
When a newer supplier consistently performs well in the data, it gives them a credible path to the kind of trust that previously took years to build.
Construction has always known that the difference between a good supplier and a poor one is the difference between a project that runs smoothly and one that doesn’t. What it has lacked, until now, is a reliable way to tell them apart before things go wrong.
