In the billion-dollar world of infrastructure, it’s never the steel or the concrete that gets in the way of progress—it’s the substance that hasn’t yet arrived. From ballistic panels for guarded buildings to specialty pumps for water treatment plants, material delays are still one of the most underappreciated dangers of meeting deadlines. Even with improvements in project planning and control software, numerous projects continue to fail to incorporate procurement realities into building schedules, resulting in cascading effects, idle manpower, and rework. But that is finally changing.
An increasing group of professionals are reengineering scheduling procedures to not only respond to, but actually anticipate material threats and among them, Deepika Dayalan has become a leading voice in that change. With experience in schedule managing for over $500 million infrastructure and utility projects, her method is based on rationale-driven, real-time capability. Apparently, her combining of procurement schedules—submittals, fabrication, delivery into Primavera P6 logic has ensured up to 40% decrease in material-related critical path delays.
On a secure federal facility project, for instance, she restructured the entire schedule around custom glazing and ballistic door fabrication. “We didn’t wait for vendor updates to dictate the schedule—we built float-based tracking workflows that accounted for default lead times and adjusted as real data came in,” she noted during a 2023 planning workshop on critical path protection. From the expert table, Deepika’s initiatives have made schedules from dull papers into living planning aids.
According to the findings of internal audits, her team avoided more than $800,000 in delay cost exposure by connecting procurement risk trends with schedule responsiveness. A tailored tracking matrix she established linked vendors, field crews, and the master schedule so that long-lead materials such as control panels or ballistic components didn’t get lost. In addition, this system provided site managers with visibility to realign labor deployment and sequence of tasks prior to the delay ever occurring on site. To this, she spearheaded work that incorporated procurement awareness into early planning stages. In water treatment plants and pumping station upgrades, her advocacy for the inclusion of procurement milestones in Level 3 and 4 schedules also reduced decentralized procurement visibility, one of the most prevalent drivers of late rescheduling.
“Once we incorporated float analysis and early warnings into weekly reports, we realized a 25% increase in on-time approval of submittals,” she published in an internal manual called Procurement Risk Integration in P6. Her writing emphasizes a common point: material delays aren’t just procurement issues—they’re disguised scheduling issues. According to the findings of her white paper Preventing Project Delays through Smart Scheduling of Long-Lead Materials, she contends that conventional scheduling tends to overlook the non-linear nature of fabrication cycles, shop drawing approvals, or vendor variability.
“Even with a solid baseline, schedules need to think ahead,” she says. If you’re able to see the procurement problem on the horizon, you can usually fix it before it ever gets to the field.” In the future, Deepika envisions AI and predictive analytics continuing to enhance procurement forecasting by pulling from past delivery histories and vendor performance. She also expects integration in real time between digital supply chains and project schedules to become standard—allowing for live synchronization between supplier obligations and construction sequence. In the end, Deepika Dayalan’s work ensures one thing: material delays will always be a possibility, but by having the proper scheduling logic, teamwork, and upfront planning, they don’t need to sidetrack progress. An intelligent schedule doesn’t simply inform you of when things should occur—it informs you of where things might go awry, and how to keep ahead of it.
