Digitizing the Last Mile of Material Logistics
Why your project needs a Material Delivery Board.
👋 Hey, Kyle here! Welcome to The Influential Project Manager, a weekly newsletter covering the essentials of successful project leadership.
Today’s Overview:
A material delivery board is such a simple thing to implement, but the benefits of knowing the details of your construction material deliveries is priceless.
If you’re not already using a building material delivery board on your project, I’d encourage you to start.
In today’s newsletter, I share some of the key elements that should be used on a great construction material delivery board.
🚚 Today’s issue is shipped to you by Krane!
Is managing your delivery schedule a never ending game of telephone?
When schedules are scattered across emails, texts, and individual planners, things fall apart fast. Missed shipments. Miscommunication. Downtime on site. It’s a problem we know all too well, and it’s costing teams valuable time and money.
It doesn’t have to be that way! With Krane’s Free Delivery Board, you can book, manage, and track deliveries all in one place. Visit Krane.com to get started today and experience seamless delivery management firsthand.
📅 Digitizing the Last Mile of Material Logistics
Filed under: Project Management, Lean Tools & Tactics
In the construction trailer, a whiteboard displays a chaotic patchwork of sticky notes, scribbles, and printed delivery schedules. Each note represents critical material deliveries—conduit, drywall, steel beams—timed to arrive just in time to avoid delays.
But the inevitable happens. A delivery change written on a sticky note is smudged beyond recognition. Someone snaps a photo of the board to send to the back office, but it’s blurry and incomplete. A driver shows up at the wrong gate, or worse, the wrong day. Delays ripple through the schedule, and suddenly, your project is bleeding money.
Construction projects are incredibly complex, requiring precise coordination to avoid waste and delays. Yet the "last mile" of material logistics is often an analog nightmare.
Today, we're tackling how to fix it:
Why you need a material delivery board
Simple tool to digitize and streamline your logistics
How to save thousands by getting materials where they need to be, on time
Let’s dive in.
Why use a Material Delivery Board?
Early in my career, I learned a lesson I'll never forget.
A semi arrived at my site loaded with casework, but the trade partner had already left for the day. With no one available to unload or stage the material, and no clear plan in place, the driver dropped the load in the middle of the site and left.
By morning, chaos had taken over. Crews spent hours rearranging other deliveries just to access the casework. Frustration grew, and productivity tanked. When I brought this up to my superintendent, his response was blunt: “This is just construction—deal with it.”
At first, I had a hard time hearing it. Like chaos was just part of the job I had to accept. I wasn’t convinced. So, I set up a simple material delivery board—a whiteboard with days of the week where trades had to schedule their drop-offs. If a delivery wasn’t on the board, it wasn’t allowed onsite.
The results were immediate. Deliveries became predictable, staging was organized, and productivity improved. It was a small change with a big impact.
If you’re not already using a building material delivery board on your project, I’d encourage you to start. Ask your trade partners these six questions before any delivery:
Who is making the delivery?
What is being delivered?
When will it arrive (day and time)?
What type of truck is bringing it?
Where will it be unloaded?
How will it be unloaded?
Lesson: Stop saying "this is how we have always done it" and start saying "let's find a better way."
🤖 The Need for Real-Time Material Coordination
The construction industry has gone digital in many areas, from accounting to scheduling. But when it comes to managing material deliveries, many teams still rely on outdated methods—spreadsheets, text chains, and smudged whiteboards in the trailer.
These analog tools can’t handle today’s speed and complexity. Material delays create bottlenecks that stall crews, blow schedules, and inflate budgets. With tight labor markets and supply chain challenges, inefficiency is not an option.
To mitigate risk in construction projects, general contractors, specialty contractors, and owners must replace inefficient, error-prone analog planning with a collaborative, real-time digital solution.
Delivery Software for Lean Material Management
The Lean Construction methodology and its related Last Planner System® became increasingly popular in recent years for planning and managing large construction project types, including offices, hotels, apartments, factories and warehouses, to name a few.
In keeping with the traditional methods, Lean Construction is most widely realized today with planning boards and group meetings in construction trailers. With this process comes the risks of misplaced notes, poor penmanship, fuzzy photos and incorrect data entry.
This crossroad creates a clear need for planning software that reduces the risks of analog processes while maintaining the many benefits of Lean Construction. Krane is leaning out the construction supply chain by empowering general contractors, trade partners, and project stakeholders to manage materials with precision. The Material Delivery Board is a free digital tool that reduces risk, eliminates waste, and enhances communication.
Here’s how it works:
Real-Time Updates: Everyone sees the latest schedule instantly.
AI Insights: Detect delays and re-sequence with smart suggestions.
Seamless Collaboration: GCs, subs, and suppliers access a single source of truth.
Visual Analytics: Dashboards make tracking progress and solving problems easy.
By moving material logistics to a digital platform, Krane eliminates the risks of smudged notes, fragmented communication, and missed deliveries.
Envisioning the Digitized Last Mile
Rather than leaving urgent activities, deliveries, and materials at risk of falling to the dusty floor, imagine a digitized Lean Material Management process that assures timely project deliveries.
The whiteboard in the trailer is replaced by a flat-screen TV connected to the superintendent’s laptop running the digital delivery software. The superintendent and trade partners gather to review upcoming deliveries. Adjustments are made in real time with a few clicks, instantly syncing to all stakeholders.
When a supplier notifies the team of a delay, Krane’s AI automatically suggests a re-sequencing plan to avoid disruption. Drivers receive precise gate instructions and drop-off times, eliminating confusion and wasted trips.
A trade foreman on-site notices a material shortage and flags it through the mobile app. The updated delivery schedule populates the Material Delivery Board, ensuring the next shipment arrives before crews are idle.
From the site to the back office, the digitized Lean planning process creates predictable production plans, promotes effective handoffs between disciplines, and optimizes the flow of the project to avoid delays that can cost the data center owner millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Deliver Projects Without Delays
There’s too much riding on construction projects to leave material logistics to analog processes.
Digitizing the last mile brings order, clarity, and collaboration to the chaos of construction. The hard work that goes into a project will materialize faster with drastically reduced risk.
The days of sticky notes and smudged schedules are over. With Krane, your team can focus on building, not chasing deliveries.
Learn more about how Krane’s Free Material Delivery Board is improving the way construction projects manage materials.
HIT REPLY ↩️
What do you want to hear more about?
I'd love to hear more about YOU and what you're trying to accomplish in 2025.
What type of essays help you the most? What do you want to hear more about? Hit reply and let me know.
Until next week,
Kyle Nitchen
Whenever you're ready, there are 5 ways I can help you:
Get my first book! No Bullsh*t Project: A Project Manager’s Guide to Successful Project Leadership
Upgrade your PM software. Experience the future operating system for construction and real estate development.
Get my full toolbox (free). Access 30+ software and hardware tools I'm using today.
Learn Takt Planning. Elevate your skills as a scheduler, planner, and lean builder with the Takt Planning & Control online course. Use code "Influentialpmtakt" for 30% off.
Advertise in my newsletter. Put your brand in front of 4,750+ construction project managers, leaders, and execs. (Booked out 5 weeks)