Lower Your Material Costs
We've all been affected by the ever-increasing cost of materials in the roofing business. Many times there isn't much we can do about it; we cut down on overhead, materials excesses, overtime, and, still, cost continues to gain ground on profits. I've come across a service that can help in negotiating your materials purchasing price based on the availability and volatility of the raw materials that go into making the roofing products you use in every job.
In recent years, we have all read articles showing up in our industry publications that warn and inform us of increasing costs - "Steel Prices Soar", "Polyiso Shortages", "Plywood Shortages In Wake of Hurricane Katrina" etc., etc. When raw materials are in high demand or short supply, we can count on increased prices showing up on our purchase orders. That's the "Law of Supply and Demand" and it's understandable. But what about when the cost of those same materials swings the other way? (Which they inevitably do...) Are the suppliers of those materials volunteering to drop your costs back to where they were? Not likely. Do you know enough to ask for that decrease? Again, not likely.
Not many of us have the time monitor the rise and fall of commodities prices even if we had the skills to interpret those changes. Fortunately, there are some out there who spend their days doing just that. Which brings me to my recent discovery: propurchaser.com. This website is dedicated to tracking the rise and fall of material costs and delivering that information to your pc. It will allow you to negotiate from a position of strength and knowledge when you are confronted with price increases and also enables you to instigate your own negotiation to decrease prices when materials stabilize or go down. The ability to negotiate prices will be most effectively used by those with the greatest purchasing power-our associate suppliers and manufacturers. Individual roofing companies may have limited success in negotiating with raw materials suppliers since our purchasing amounts are small in the grand scheme of things. However, the knowledge of current price fluctuations and the ability to demonstrate falling base costs after a period of end-user price increases could add percentage points to overall profit margins.
Propurchaser.com can be customizable to suit your particular needs and materials list so you don't have to wade through thousands of materials to get the information that truly affects your company. It also has a program to alert you to dramatic changes in market pricing and/or on a regulated schedule.
There are other websites which provide this information specific to their industries, but with the many different materials used in our industry, it is nice to have all that information grouped in one source and delivered to our computers when and where we need it.