Owner’s Guide
The Twelve Month Wait: What Long Lead Equipment Really Costs a Project
Five years ago, ordering a transformer meant a wait of four to six weeks. Today the National Electrical Manufacturers Association puts that wait at up to three years for some units, with distribution transformers running double or triple their pre pandemic lead times. Those numbers come from the manufacturing side of the business. They rarely make it into a project schedule until the day someone has to explain why the building cannot get permanent power.
Owners plan around the risks they can see: permitting, weather, subcontractor availability. The equipment that has to be ordered before a building can function, switchgear, transformers, elevators, generators, chillers, is easy to overlook because it lives inside someone else’s procurement log, not the owner’s. It only becomes visible the day it is the reason the project is late.
Having managed procurement across residential and mixed use projects in Florida and Connecticut, here is where this risk actually hides, what it looks like when it goes wrong, and what I do differently because of it.
What Counts as Long Lead
A long lead item is anything with a manufacturing and shipping timeline longer than the time left between design completion and the point the building actually needs it installed. Switchgear, transformers, elevators, generators, chillers, curtain wall, and specialty windows and doors are the usual list on a high end residential or mixed use project. Most of these need to be ordered against preliminary specifications, before the architect has finished construction documents, because waiting for final drawings to place the order means the equipment arrives after the building is ready for it, not before.
This is also why long lead risk is different from ordinary schedule risk. A framing delay or a permitting holdup usually has a workaround. A transformer that will not arrive for another year does not.
What Happened on The Mark
On The Mark, our building transformers were delayed during Hurricane Ian. The utility diverted the units we had on order to restore power to existing buildings that had lost it in the storm, which was the right call for the community and the wrong outcome for our schedule. We waited an additional twelve months for replacement equipment and ran the project on temporary power the entire time.
That delay had nothing to do with our general contractor, our design team, or our budget discipline. It was a utility making a reasonable decision about who needed power more urgently, with our project sitting behind that decision and no leverage to move up the line. That is what long lead risk actually looks like. It is frequently outside everyone’s control on the project, which is exactly why it has to be tracked separately from the risks that are.
How I Manage This Risk Now
I keep a procurement log that runs parallel to the CPM schedule from feasibility onward, not from GMP buyout onward. Long lead equipment gets identified and priced before the architect has finished a single construction document, so ordering can start the moment specifications are firm enough to commit to.
I also stay in direct contact with the utility and with manufacturer representatives rather than relying only on the general contractor’s secondhand updates. A two week slip reported through three layers of subcontractors can already be a two month slip by the time it reaches the owner. And I build contingency into the budget for the items most exposed to this kind of risk, temporary power, generator rental, and interim solutions that keep the project moving while equipment is in transit. Nobody wants to pay for a year of temporary power. It still costs far less than a year of carrying costs on a stalled building.
If you are planning a project with any of the following, this is worth addressing before you are under contract with anyone:
- Identify every long lead item during feasibility, not after the architect issues construction documents, and get real pricing and lead time commitments in writing.
- Track procurement on its own schedule, parallel to the CPM schedule, with someone accountable for chasing it who is not waiting on secondhand updates.
- Budget contingency for the equipment most exposed to this kind of risk, so a delay outside anyone’s control does not become a cash flow crisis on top of a schedule problem.
None of this stops a hurricane from happening or a utility from making the call it has to make. It makes sure you find out about that kind of risk in month two of a project instead of month fourteen, while there is still time to plan around it instead of just absorbing it.
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