Your supply chain is more fragmented than you think
We analysed six months of booking data across six US states. In Florida, only 8.5% of subcontractors worked on more than one site.
· Voyage Control
Contractors tend to assume they work with a reasonably stable set of trade partners. The booking data does not support that assumption.
We looked at real bookings across selected projects in six US states over the first half of 2023, and measured one thing: how often the same subcontractor appears on more than one of your sites.
The numbers
| State | Bookings | Sites | Subcontractors | On multiple sites |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 5,741 | 14 | 174 | 20.1% |
| Boston | 4,685 | 16 | 213 | 19.7% |
| California | 206 | 10 | 91 | 9.8% |
| Florida | 650 | 10 | 47 | 8.5% |
In Florida, roughly nine out of ten subcontractors on your projects are working on exactly one of them. Even in the densest market we measured, four out of five are.
Why it matters operationally
Every one of those firms is a separate onboarding. A separate set of people who need to learn how your site books deliveries, who to call, and what the rules are. If your logistics process only exists in the heads of your site team, you are re-teaching it to a near-new population on every project.
This is the practical case for standardising. Not because standardisation is tidy, but because a fragmented supply chain means the marginal cost of a bespoke, site-specific process is paid over and over again.
Why it matters commercially
It also means supplier performance data is thin unless you aggregate it centrally. If a firm appears on one site once, one site’s superintendent has an opinion about them and nobody else has anything. Aggregate the booking record across the portfolio and you start to have something you can act on at procurement rather than at the gate.
Fragmentation is not going away — it is a structural feature of how construction is contracted. The response is not to fight it but to make the process it has to plug into identical everywhere.