As supply chain disruptions threaten to shelve some projects completely, more owners are using professional services firms to help reconfigure limited staff resources and keep schedules moving forward.

With projects facing rising material costs, crunched schedules and labor shortages, project delivery firms say owners are finding themselves at a fork in the road when it comes to design-bid-build versus alternative delivery models.

As design firms in California and Hawaii roared ahead in 2021, Northwest firms continued to struggle with familiar issues.

In 2021, slowdowns in the regional oil and gas market as well as global supply chain delays impacted A/E companies doing business in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

Revenues are improving, but regional AEC firms continue to struggle with materials shortages, protracted delivery times and hybrid work arrangements.

Overall, specialty contractors in California and the Northwest reported mixed revenue totals last year, in large part due to project delays stemming from the pandemic. 

With another year of the coronavirus pandemic nearing its end, owners have mostly moved past reactionary plans for completing stalled projects and are now actively planning new ones. Looking ahead, how will fundamental changes to market sectors lead owners to potentially reconfigure business models?

The problems of workforce availability and materials pricing are challenging contractors across the Southeast