Logistics for a giga-project
A new city, port or industrial zone built from scratch in a remote region is, before anything else, a logistics problem. Millions of tonnes of material a year have to arrive by sea, rail and road, be stored, sorted and delivered to dozens of work sites that are all starting at once.
Below, the whole supply chain in one drawing, then a model that sizes it: what the demand means in trucks, trains, vessels, berths and storage, and how much flows through manufacture and fabrication.
From suppliers to the contractor's workface: twelve stages, the capability layers that run across them, and where programme logistics hands over to the contractor. Select any stage or layer for the commentary.
One system, not twelve contracts
- It is one flow. Materials pass through a dozen hands between the supplier and the workface. Each handover can be run well and the whole still fail, because the queues form between them. The chain has to be designed, and measured, end to end.
- The capability layer is what makes it work. A control tower that forecasts and plans, a supply chain managed for the programme rather than project by project, and a live model of demand and supply that pulls materials in the order they are needed. Without them the physical assets are just a very large warehouse.
- The boundary matters. Programme logistics ends at the project logistics zone; the contractor takes over there. Where that line sits, the service levels on each side and the data passed across it decide whether materials are handled once or twice, or not at all.
- Industrialise near the work. Manufacture, fabrication, customisation and pre-assembly close to site take tonnes and trades off the network, with buffers either side to decouple them from supply and from site. They are logistics decisions as much as construction ones.
Conversion assumptions (edit)
Six choices that shape the system
- Size demand before you design the network. Build the material demand bottom-up from the construction programme: tonnes by material, by month, by location. Peak demand, not average, sets the size of ports, railheads, factories, fleets and buffers.
- Decide what to make in the ecosystem and what to bring in. Heavy, bulky products are expensive to move far; high-value components and specialist equipment are not. Manufacturing and fabrication near the work cut the tonnes on the network and let products be customised to each site, but those facilities need their own supply, power, water and people.
- Build the logistics before the construction. The port, railhead, haul roads, laydown and accommodation have to exist before peak construction starts. Interim facilities bridge the gap, and they are often needed at scale for years, so plan them as assets, not stopgaps.
- Choose the operating model deliberately. Run logistics in-house, buy it from third-party logistics providers, or form a joint venture with a specialist logistics partner. The choice decides who invests, who carries demand risk, and who controls the flow when projects compete for capacity.
- Run it through one control tower. Deliveries are pulled by site readiness, booked into slots and sequenced across every project on one schedule. Without it, each contractor pushes its own deliveries and the network jams at the gate, the berth and the junction.
- Move people as carefully as materials. In a remote region the workforce has to be housed, fed and transported. Shift patterns, bus fleets and camp capacity are part of the logistics system, and they cap productivity if they are left to each contractor.
We design construction logistics and supply chain strategies for large programmes, from demand modelling and network design to the operating model and the partners that run it. Discuss a logistics strategy →