PBC Today caught up with founder and CEO of YardLink Neeral Shah at Digital Construction Week 2023, where we spoke about the benefits of standardisation and collaboration in the supply chain
How are you finding Digital Construction Week?
It’s great. We’ve already met some fantastic potential customers – from large to small contractors – all interested in what we’re offering at YardLink as they look to innovate in the way they procure their equipment and materials.
How important is collaboration to YardLink?
Working closely with our customers to solve their problems is our number one priority. For this reason, we always seek to innovate in the way we collaborate with them directly, with the aim of speeding up their procurement, reducing costs and minimising downtime.
Instead of ideating and thinking about a solution in a black box and then presenting it to a customer, we actually work with them to understand the problem first hand, working through initial drawings and frameworks with them before we launch anything.
Given that we’re a marketplace, it’s a fully collaborative process. We connect customers with suppliers, but also do the same on the supply side. In short, we’re developing a solution for the supply chain in a fully collaborative way.
What kind of supplier network are you working with?
We started in London and grew on a city-by-city basis. Today, we’re fully national with over 2,000 supplier depots across the country.
We work with over 600 suppliers and take as much feedback as possible from a diverse variety of participants on our supply chain. This then informs how we release a product or a feature for them.
How has standardising plant and equipment supply benefited your customers?
We started off as an equipment rental marketplace, connecting customers with equipment rental suppliers. And we’ve had good success with that. Then our customers asked for more products from us, so we launched Waste Management and then construction materials.
We went out to our supply chain network and brought in 80 to 100 new suppliers on the supply chain of Waste Management, and we’re now offering this category to our customers.
Ultimately, our customers are really finding a lot of value in being able to procure everything in one place. Because we standardise quotations and products, we make it very, very easy for the customer.
And then the fact that they can rent, for example, an excavator through YardLink, as well as the muck away, is just super convenient. Because they’re now able to coordinate two sides of a supply chain in one, it’s much more cost effective, as well.
The other thing that we’re really proud of is the way we localise the supply chain. We’ve got a really large span of suppliers across the country, but over 90% of our orders are delivered within 15 miles of any project, which gives huge savings on time and emissions.
YardLink was recently commended for their efforts towards establishing gender equality in the workforce. How important are ED&I principles to the company?
Absolutely. We still have a long way to go, of course, but we’re at 50% gender parity in the workforce now. And again, we want to just get better and better. We’re true believers in diversity and we realise diversity makes us better.
How is YardLink diversifying and developing the skill set of their workforce?
We have progression in place for every role and a clear path of how you can get to the next level. We also have a learning budget for every single employee.
We provide them with an allowance annually for whatever they want to do, whether it’s work related or a hobby, but they can just use that money to basically better themselves – and learn something new.
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