Nobody told him the date could move

The cost sits with one party and the decision sits with another

The network is built and renewed by external contractors, and it is those contractors project managers who decide what material to order and when. Idle material on an open site is not a line on their accounts. There are no additional costs and no repercussions for them, and surplus cable and transformers can be moved to their next job.

So the exposure, in capital tied up and in how a street full of cable drums looks to the people who live on it, sits with the network operator, while every decision that creates it sits with somebody else.

The sprint mapped how each contractor actually orders, then reconstructed how long the material then lay there, from delivery and installation dates on four completed projects.

A factor of four between two contractors doing the same work

Average idle time for cable came out at 46 and 47 days on the first contractor two projects, and 112 and 183 on the second. Same client, same kind of project, four times the standstill.

On the worst of them, cable averaged 183 days idle, substations 180 and transformers 178, with individual substations sitting as long as 189 days. The project had been delayed after the material was already ordered.

The reason is the finding that gives this page its title. That contractor project managers did not know that a delivery date, once placed, can be postponed. The contractor had never prioritised telling them, because idle material had never cost the contractor anything.

The other five causes, in order

Both contractors take delivery of every transformer and substation before construction starts. The reason is real: excavators work in one direction and going back over ground already covered costs money, so the site has to be able to start digging anywhere. Transformers, though, are largely standard products, which means they can be batched. Substations are customised, and no systemic fix was found for those.

Both add a buffer on top of the volume the planning system calculates, 10 to 15 per cent at one contractor and 5 to 10 at the other, and cable comes in 500 or 1,000 metre multiples. On one project about 4.5 kilometres of cable was ordered above what was installed, against a need of roughly 47 kilometres.

Material is sometimes ordered before the terrain plan is accepted, so any planning delay converts directly into standstill. The largest cause of that delay is getting landowner agreements signed.

And the planning system is under used because people cannot drive it. Cable volumes can be read from it only by clicking every individual cable. One contractor tracking spreadsheet counts what is left to order but cannot say when to order it.

Nothing was being watched, because there was nothing to watch it with

There is no stock record and no warehouse. Field managers judge whether cable is running out by looking, a couple of times a week, and inspect less often as it costs money to drive around. Material stands in open fields and at installation points.

Eight to ten cable drums go to site each week and stay until they are used, and several low voltage drums sit near houses, which the operator carries as a perception problem rather than a cost one.

If more cable is needed mid project, the wait can be one to two months if the supplier has none in stock. Which is a good reason to over order, and explains the buffer that everybody adds.

What was recommended, and what it costs

The six causes were ranked by impact and the recommendations follow that order. Run knowledge transfer with contractor project managers so they know the delivery date can be moved, and make a schedule change trigger a formal communication about material orders. Batch transformer deliveries the way one contractor already batches cable. Restrict ordering before the terrain plan is accepted, and speed up landowner agreements by letting contractors use the operator name, which landowners find credible.

For the drums standing in residential streets, a fitted cover was costed against two supplier quotations, at roughly 560 euros unmodified or 1,850 euros shaped to the drums for a 75 square metre area, with a stated material life of up to fifteen years. A portable storage tent was quoted at about 2,800 euros. Those are external quotations, not client spend.

The storage question was deliberately placed last, on the reasoning that fixing the first four causes reduces how much there is to store. A permanent warehouse makes no sense for contractors running six month projects.

What this study can carry

Twenty interviews totalling twenty and a half hours across the operator and two contractors, and four completed projects. Two contractors is a sample, not a portfolio, and the idle day figures are derived from delivery and installation dates under stated assumptions rather than observed item by item.

No euro value is placed on idle material anywhere in this work, and none is invented here. Nothing was implemented during the sprint. What it produced was a measured size for a problem nobody was counting, six ranked causes, and one fix that costs nothing at all: tell the people placing the orders that the date can move.