Challenges of the Pandemic: Material Shortages
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on many industries. The roofing industry is one of them. At the onset of the pandemic, many roofing projects had to actually be stopped until the industry received an official essential service classification.
Many items became scarce in the worldwide supply chain, including roofing materials. Requests for roof installations and repairs started to pile up. This turned into a huge problem as the lack of materials couldn’t keep up with the number of jobs that needed to be done.
As a result of the pandemic, many manufacturing plants that made these materials were shut down.
Even the slightest pause in production can have a major impact on the roofing industry. Since production lines weren’t creating the materials that roofers needed to complete installations and do repairs promptly.
In order to compensate, many in the industry started carrying 3 times the inventory they normally do.
These are some of the day-to-day problems that we were dealing with. Our urethane materials were in short supply — we had to wait around 30 days sometimes.
For other roofers, it was even worse — TPO rubber roofers were being told that supplies could not come in until September of 2022.
We had to order much more than we normally would have just to be able to serve our customers, and on top of that, materials were increasing in price by 4-6% every month.
Materials Are Still not Available on Demand
Currently, roofing professionals are dealing with the fact that they can’t get materials on demand if a customer has a crisis (like a storm or fire).
Many of their shops no longer have the luxury of placing orders for materials and waiting 2 to 3 weeks for them to arrive.
The roofing items and materials that have been most recently affected include plates, adhesives, fasteners, thermoplastic polyolefin, TPO, and ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM).
Unfortunately, it’s highly probable that the trend of material shortages will continue into the coming year.
In order to provide the best service to our customers that we can, we’ve tried to anticipate these emergencies and how much materials are needed to get the job done.
DFW Urethane is so fortunate that our suppliers have continued to supply us if we give them ample notice, so we are remaining committed to giving you the best customer experience provided by any roofing business in the industry.
We have an immense amount of gratitude for all of our customers, and we don’t take the trust they have put in us for granted.
However, because of the material shortages, we need advanced notice on your project so that we can ensure we can offer you the best service possible.
If you have a roofing project coming up in the future, please call us so we can get with our suppliers and make sure we can fill your order.
Thanks in advance for your patience.