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Freight
Detention works like a tax on construction freight, levied whenever the crane isn’ t ready, the laydown area is blocked, or the gate is congested. When trucks repeatedly wait on your construction sites, you pay hourly detention now and higher rates or lost capacity later.
Schedule-driven procurement means materials are ordered late and shipped via expedited shipping. When every shipment is last-minute, expedited premiums become routine rather than exceptional. This results in a permanent rush surcharge built into every project’ s freight expenses. Structural waste of this kind persists until freight becomes visible enough to model in the first place.
Freight mistakes construction companies keep making Overpaying for freight is rarely a single bad decision. It’ s a collection of small mistakes, repeated on every project until they harden into standard practice.
Here are some common freight mistakes:
■ Accepting delivered pricing without a breakout prevents contractors from benchmarking material or freight costs separately, and some suppliers count on exactly that.
■ Booking every load as a rush turns poor schedule coordination into a standing planning tax, since expedited flatbed rates run well above standard.
■ Treating detention as a cost of doing business lets avoidable hourly charges pile up at congested sites, unnoticed because no one tracks how often trucks sit idle.
■ Ignoring backhaul and consolidation opportunities means contractors with multiple sites in a region pay for two halfempty trucks when one full one would do.
■ Failing to document damage at delivery results in concealed-damage claims being denied, and the replacement material then ships via expedited shipping, compounding the loss.
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