From guesswork to full visibility. How SSG Contracts got real-time financial control across 30 active projects.

SSG Contracts delivers logistics fit-outs, commercial refurbishments, and mechanical and electrical works for clients like Amazon, DHL, and FedEx, where supply chain performance is non-negotiable. Keeping track of what each project was actually costing wasn’t a question of effort. It was a question of tools. And the tools available weren’t built for this.

So they did what every procurement team does when the tools aren’t good enough: they built their own. Line by line, across a manually updated Excel tracker with estimated costs. Across 30 concurrent sites, that gap between cost incurred and cost visible wasn’t an administrative inconvenience. It was a margin problem.

Today, every piece of hired equipment and every waste movement across all projects sits on one platform. Costs are live. Off-hires take seconds. And the procurement team has full financial visibility of every project, every order, and every invoice, without a phone call, a spreadsheet, or a chase email.

The hidden cost of manual procurement

Before working with YardLink, every project followed the same pattern. Search for a supplier. Find the nearest depot. Make contact. Negotiate terms. Receive a price. Raise a purchase order. Then repeat that process for every equipment category, across a fragmented supplier base of well over a dozen suppliers, different contacts, different terms, different invoicing processes.

Understanding true project spend meant waiting for invoices to land, then manually reconciling them against the Excel tracker. Scope would change. The tracker would fall behind. And by the time real costs were visible, the project had already moved on, and the margin had moved with it.

“I’d figure out all the hire, all the equipment, how many weeks the job was, and just multiply it all manually. It was a big, messy tracker that was really difficult to maintain. And it was still an estimated cost. We never knew the real number.”
James Proctor, Project Procurement Coordinator, SSG Contracts

With a lean team managing a growing pipeline of concurrent projects for clients who expect consistent delivery every time, there was no room for guesswork. Manual procurement wasn’t just slow. It was a risk.

One platform. Every project. Real-time financial control.

SSG Contracts have worked with YardLink for equipment hire and waste movements since 2023. The foundation is operational: one point of contact, and a named operations team who respond within the hour. When scope changes overnight on any one of SSG’s live sites, that’s the difference between staying on schedule and explaining a delay to their clients.

But the transformation from how they manage procurement day-to-day comes from what’s visible inside the YardLink platform. For SSG Contracts, that means consolidating what was once a fragmented supplier base into a single view. Over 500 orders sit inside it, every one tracked by project alongside committed costs, amounts due, and upcoming expenditure, with no manual compilation required. Committed costs that used to take James the best part of a week to get directly from suppliers are now visible the moment they’re committed.

Where off-hiring equipment once meant phone calls and emails adding up to hours each week, it now takes seconds through the dashboard. On average, that’s the best part of half a day back every week. And, live hire and sustainability reports can be downloaded by project, instantly, giving the team what they need to prove sustainability compliance on live tenders without pulling the data together by hand.

“I click into any of our projects and I can see every single piece of equipment we’ve got on hire and what the total value of that is. If I need to off-hire something, I can schedule it through the dashboard at the click of a button, compared to making a phone call or writing a whole email. That is a massive time save that compounds with every job.”
James Proctor, Project Procurement Coordinator, SSG Contracts

When visibility is tested: Bicester warehouse refurbishment

SSG Contracts are managing the refurbishment of a 30-year-old former DHL warehouse in Bicester, a 30-metre building, with a 50/50 split of high and low bays, being brought back to modern standard to attract a new tenant. The 10-month project demands hundreds of temporary fencing panels, lighting rigs, skips, and transformers to meet the site’s continuous power requirements.

Three months in, criminal damage to the site’s mains cabling forced a full rewiring and re-energisation effort, extending the project by months and demanding an immediate supply chain response.

Because every piece of equipment on-site was already visible in the YardLink platform, the procurement team could immediately identify what was there, what needed to be off-hired, and what had to be ordered in. Within 48 hours, transformers, tower lights, and festoon lights were on the ground, enabling the landlord to assess the site with insurers and keeping the project moving.

“We didn’t have time to start chasing what was on-site, we needed to know immediately. The dashboard gave us that. We got the equipment within 48 hours, the landlord could get round with the insurers, and the project kept moving. That’s what you need from a supply chain partner when things go wrong.”
Wayne Porter, Senior Customer Relations Manager, SSG Contracts

A relationship built on consistent delivery

SSG Contracts’ work doesn’t stop at the UK border. When a colleague needed tool hire support for groundwork jobs on an Amazon site in Germany, the recommendation came from the procurement team directly. Not from a supplier shortlist. Not from a procurement process. From two years of placing hundreds of orders with a team who were trusted to deliver.

YardLink sourced the equipment through a local German supplier, and the project slotted straight into the same dashboard as every UK site. No new supplier onboarding, no separate reporting process, no learning curve for a first international job.

“A colleague needed tool hire support for a project in Germany and asked me who to use. I told them about YardLink. We’d placed hundreds of orders with them at that point, I knew how they communicated, I knew they’d sort it. It wasn’t a complicated decision. When something works, you stick with it.”
James Proctor, Project Procurement Coordinator, SSG Contracts

Still tracking project costs across spreadsheets and phone calls? Call us on 0330 808 8897 to see what full visibility actually looks like.