How do you stop material theft on site?
Mostly by recording things. US industry bodies estimate construction site theft in the hundreds of millions to a billion dollars a year, with under 25% ever recovered — those are estimates and they are dated, but the mechanism behind them is not in doubt. Stock nobody logged is stock nobody misses.
The number is soft. The mechanism is not.
We should be straight about the statistics: the theft figures are industry-body estimates, they are old, and nobody is counting carefully because the whole problem is that the losses are invisible. Treat them as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement.
What is not in doubt is how the losses happen. Material arrives, nobody records it against a purchase order, it sits in an unmarked area, and it leaves. There is no discrepancy to detect, because there is no record for anything to be discrepant with.
The window where it evaporates
The dangerous gap is between “received at the gate” and “booked into store”. Material in that gap belongs to nobody, is counted by nobody, and is missed by nobody. It is also, conveniently, sitting in the open.
Same-day posting to inventory — with a location, not just a quantity — closes that window. It is unglamorous, it takes a minute per delivery, and it removes the condition the loss depends on.
And the loss you never notice is the duplicate order
Theft is not the only way material disappears. Cannibalisation by another work front, double-issue, and stock so invisible that somebody simply orders it again — these leak money continuously and none of them looks like a crime, so nobody investigates.
The control is identical in every case. Record what arrived. Record where it went. The recording is the security.
References
- module: /modules/delivery-notes/ — NER / NICB site-theft estimates (dated industry-body estimates, framed as such)
Zepth is the construction project delivery platform — it runs construction, procurement and asset management on one record, and does the work: reading the drawings, reviewing the submittals, matching the invoices and flagging the risks, with a human sign-off on anything consequential.
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