Many trade contractors were forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to take a hard look at their supply chains. When StructShare entered the market in 2021, buying, storing and shipping materials like electrical conduit and ductwork was still often relying on email, manual data entry and accounting systems built off of spreadsheets or paper notepads.
The Austin, Texas-based startup has built a cloud platform for specialty contractor supply chains, covering procurement as well as workflow management and communication. Tools in StructShare can create purchase orders, track deliveries, manage warehouse inventory, identify problems such as price increases or lack of availability and track whether received deliveries match orders. All of these tasks in estimating and procurement can be completed from a smartphone or desktop app, and estimators and project executives do not have to change their existing purchasing processes. All purchase orders are generated as dynamic PDFs so paper records can be generated if needed, but all of a specialty contractor’s inventory and purchase history is saved in the cloud, allowing the system to capture many of the nuances of construction procurement.