By Kyle Mussmacher | constructionresourceutilization.com

Every mega-project has the same dirty secret hiding in its cost reports.

Not the change orders. Not the rework. Not even the procurement disasters that make your project controls team age five years in six months.

It’s the support trades.

Scaffolding. Insulation. Coatings. Fireproofing. Temporary facilities. The trades everyone needs, nobody owns, and almost every project contracts in the dumbest way imaginable.

Here’s the number that should keep every project director awake at night: treating support trades as a shared service instead of siloed subcontracts can reduce their combined cost by 20% or more. That’s not a theoretical model. That’s what happens when you stop letting five different prime contractors independently hire, schedule, and manage the same scaffolding resources across the same site.

And yet, almost nobody does it.

Let’s talk about why this works, where it’s been proven, and why the industry keeps choosing the expensive path anyway.

What “Shared Service” Actually Means in This Context

Let’s get precise, because the term “shared services” gets thrown around loosely.

In a traditional mega-project contracting structure, each prime contractor or EPC package owner manages their own support trade subcontracts. Contractor A hires their scaffolding sub. Contractor B hires theirs. Contractor C hires a third. All three scaffolding crews show up on the same site,

 erect structures within 200 feet of each other, and never share a single component, design, or labor hour.

Multiply that by insulation, coatings, abatement, and temporary facilities and you have an indirect cost structure that’s bloated by duplication at every level: supervision, equipment, mobilization, material laydown, and coordination overhead.

A shared service model centralizes these support trades under a single contract — typically managed by the owner or a program management contractor — and deploys them across all work fronts as a site-wide resource. One scaffolding contractor. One insulation team. One coatings crew. Shared across every package, sequenced against the integrated schedule, and managed as a project resource rather than a subcontract line item buried in someone else’s budget.

The Construction Industry Institute (CII) identified scaffolding specifically as both the most challenging and the most wasteful indirect construction cost category. Their Research Team 282 documented that indirect construction costs account for anywhere from 10% to 40% of total construction cost, and that nearly 90% of subject matter experts confirmed better management of these costs leads to better project performance. Scaffolding sits at the center of that finding.

Where This Has Actually Worked

This isn’t theoretical. The model has been applied — with varying degrees of commitment — on some of the largest construction programs in the world.

Australian LNG Mega-Projects

The Australian LNG construction boom of the 2010s produced some of the most expensive projects ever built. Chevron’s Gorgon LNG project on Barrow Island ultimately cost $54 billion against a $37 billion estimate. INPEX’s Ichthys LNG project exceeded $45 billion against an initial $20 billion budget.

Within these programs, scaffolding alone represented enormous expenditure. MAS Australasia secured a $155 million (AUD $174 million) scaffolding contract on the Ichthys onshore LNG facilities — and that was just one package on one portion of the project. On Gorgon, APS Systems started with a small team and grew to 100+ tradesmen providing scaffolding, rigging, and access services across the project. The scope required riggers, scaffolders, boilermakers, and electricians all operating as a multi-craft access services team.

What these programs demonstrated was that when support trades were consolidated under integrated service providers rather than fragmented across multiple EPC packages, coordination improved and rework decreased. Where each EPC contractor managed their own scaffolding sub independently, scaffold erect-dismantle-re-erect cycles multiplied — a structure built for piping would be torn down before electrical needed it, then rebuilt. When managed as a shared resource with visibility to the integrated schedule, that waste evaporated.

Multi-Craft Service Consolidation

Companies like Apache Industrial, Excel Modular Scaffold, and GSCS have built their entire business models around the shared service concept — combining scaffolding, insulation, coatings, and fireproofing under one contractor. The logic is identical to the project-level shared service model: managing these trades together reduces handoffs between crafts, eliminates premature scaffold strikes, and improves sequencing of work activities.

This isn’t just marketing. When one contractor manages both the scaffold and the insulation, they don’t tear down the access before the insulation is complete. When coatings and scaffolding share supervision and scheduling, the scaffold stays up exactly as long as it needs to and not a day longer. That sounds obvious. And yet on most mega-projects, it doesn’t happen because the contractual structure actively prevents it.

Advanced Work Packaging and Scaffold Integration

AMECO developed an integrated scaffolding solution that models the majority of required scaffolds in 3D, integrates them into construction work packages and the project schedule, and creates scaffold material recycle plans to maximize utilization. Their approach — designing scaffolds for multi-discipline use, pre-planning material picks, and providing erection crews with interactive model shots — represents exactly the kind of shared resource management that eliminates waste.

CII’s own research on construction productivity found that advanced scaffolding systems can improve labor productivity by up to 50% with equal or better cost impacts compared to conventional approaches

The Math: Where the 20% Comes From

The savings aren’t magic. They come from five specific elimination points.

Duplicated supervision. On a typical mega-project with three or four EPC packages, each contractor has their own scaffold superintendent, safety supervisor, and planning team for their scope. A shared service model needs one team. On a $2 billion+ project, scaffold supervision alone can run $3–5 million per contractor. Consolidation cuts that by two-thirds.

Equipment and material duplication. Multiple scaffolding contractors each bring their own inventory, which means separate laydown areas, separate material management systems, and inevitably, excess material sitting idle. A shared service pools the material inventory. CII research demonstrates that scaffold material recycle planning — reusing components from completed work fronts on upcoming ones — dramatically reduces material procurement costs.

Mobilization and demobilization waste. Every time a new subcontractor mobilizes to site on a mega-project, there’s a cost: onboarding, safety training, badging, equipment transport, temporary facilities setup. When each prime contractor brings separate support trade subs, you’re paying that cost multiple times. A shared service mobilizes once.

Coordination overhead. When five different scaffolding crews report to five different prime contractors, the owner’s construction management team spends enormous effort deconflicting schedules, resolving access disputes, and managing interface points between overlapping scaffolding scopes. A single shared service provider with one scheduler and one planning team eliminates that entire coordination layer.

The scaffold strike-and-rebuild cycle. This is the biggest one. On fragmented projects, scaffolding is erected by one contractor, used for one discipline, then struck — only to be rebuilt for the next discipline. Industry estimates suggest that on poorly coordinated projects, 30–40% of scaffold erect hours are wasted on premature strikes and unnecessary rebuilds. A shared service, scheduled against the integrated work package sequence, keeps scaffolding in place for all required disciplines before striking.

Add those five sources together and 20% savings on total support trade costs is conservative. On a mega-project where scaffolding, insulation, and coatings collectively represent $200–500 million in spend, that’s $40–100 million in recovered cost.

So Why Doesn’t Everyone Do This?

If the math works — and it does — why is the shared service model still the exception rather than the rule on mega-projects?

Because the barriers aren’t mathematical. They’re structural, contractual, and cultural. And they’re deeply entrenched.

1. Contracting Models Fight It

The dominant contracting structures on mega-projects — lump sum EPC, design-build, and even EPCM — are all organized around discrete scopes of work with clear interfaces. Each contractor is responsible for delivering their scope, including managing their own indirect costs. When you pull scaffolding out of their scope and hand it to a shared service provider, you’re disrupting the contractual logic that the entire project is built on.

Contractors resist this because shared services remove a line item they can mark up, control, and use as leverage in schedule negotiations. Owners resist it because it means taking on direct management responsibility for a scope they’d rather delegate. PMI research on mega-project contracting strategy confirms this tension: there is a finite supply of contractors capable of doing complex work, and those contractors want control over their execution strategy, including support trades.

2. Risk Allocation Breaks Down

In a traditional structure, if the scaffolding is late for Contractor A’s piping scope, Contractor A manages that risk internally. In a shared service model, if the shared scaffold provider is late, every contractor on site is affected — and the owner now holds that risk directly.

Most owners don’t want that exposure. They’ve spent decades building contracting strategies designed to push risk downstream. Taking direct responsibility for scaffolding delivery across an entire mega-project feels like swimming upstream. The irony is that the fragmented approach creates more total risk — it just hides it in the interfaces between contracts rather than consolidating it where it can actually be managed.

3. Procurement Teams Don’t Know How to Buy It

Shared service contracts don’t fit neatly into standard procurement categories. They’re not a subcontract. They’re not a supply agreement. They’re not professional services. Procurement teams that are structured around bid-evaluate-award cycles for discrete scopes of work struggle to write RFPs, evaluate proposals, and set up contracts for something that’s fundamentally a resource management agreement.

This creates inertia. When the procurement team doesn’t know how to buy it, the default is to not buy it — and to let each contractor handle support trades the way they always have.

4. “That’s How We’ve Always Done It”

This is the biggest barrier, and it’s the one nobody wants to admit. The construction industry’s resistance to changing established practices is well-documented. CII’s own research on implementing their best practices noted that despite dramatic potential for savings, adoption remains low because barriers — whether real or perceived — inhibit innovation and change.

On mega-projects specifically, research on lean construction adoption identified that many companies remain hesitant to embrace new methodologies due to the fragmented nature of the industry, where different contractors and subcontractors operate independently. Complex organizational hierarchies contribute to slow decision-making, and insufficient training limits the ability to apply new principles effectively.

The shared service model requires the owner to lead. It requires contractors to give up control. It requires procurement to think differently. And it requires project leadership to invest in coordination infrastructure — planners, schedulers, systems — to manage the shared resource effectively. Most organizations look at that list and decide the savings aren’t worth the organizational discomfort.

They’re wrong. But the discomfort is real.

How to Actually Make This Work

For the organizations willing to push past the inertia, the implementation path isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable.

Start in FEED, not in execution. The shared service decision has to be made during front-end engineering design, before EPC contracts are written. If you wait until contractors are already mobilized with their own support trade subs, you’ve lost. The contracting strategy has to be designed around the shared service model from the beginning.

Write the contract as a resource agreement, not a scope package. The shared service provider isn’t delivering a fixed scope. They’re providing a resource — access, insulation, coatings — that’s consumed by multiple users across the project. The contract should be structured around unit rates, utilization metrics, and service levels, not lump sum deliverables.

Invest in the coordination infrastructure. A shared service only works if there’s an integrated planning function that sequences support trade deployment against all work fronts. That means a dedicated scaffold/access planner on the owner’s team, 3D modeling of scaffold requirements integrated into construction work packages, and a material management system that tracks components across builds and recycles.

Make EPC contractors accountable for requesting, not managing. In the shared service model, prime contractors request scaffolding through a work order system. They don’t manage the scaffolding sub. This is a fundamental shift in responsibility and it needs to be explicitly written into every EPC contract scope of work and interface agreement.

Measure utilization, not just cost. The shared service model’s value comes from utilization — keeping scaffold material actively supporting productive work rather than sitting erected but unused, or sitting in the laydown yard. Track scaffold utilization rates (percentage of erected scaffold actively supporting work) as a KPI and report it alongside cost.

The Bottom Line

The construction industry has a resource utilization problem. We’ve talked about it on this site before. The governance systems that manage mega-projects are structurally blind to utilization metrics, and nowhere is that more visible than in how we contract support trades.

Treating scaffolding, insulation, coatings, and temporary facilities as shared services across mega-project work fronts isn’t a revolutionary idea. It’s basic resource management applied to a contracting structure that has stubbornly refused to evolve.

The 20% is there. The proof is there. The question isn’t whether the model works.

The question is whether your organization has the will to do something different.

And if history is any guide, most won’t. Which means the ones that do will have a significant cost and schedule advantage over every competitor still running the playbook from 1995.

Your move.

Kyle Mussmacher is a construction project manager and resource utilization consultant. He writes about the gap between how the construction industry manages projects and how it should. Find more at constructionresourceutilization.com.

Tags: mega-projects, shared services, scaffolding, insulation, contracting strategy, resource utilization, construction cost reduction, indirect construction costs, EPC, support trades, construction management