Abstract

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) lets around 700 contracts year valued at over $1 billion. One of KYTC’s foremost goals is to deliver projects on time and on budget. However, over the past five years achieving these twin goals has grown in difficulty due to material shortages, widespread inflation, supply chain disruptions, and the tight labor market triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although material shortages have abated and supply chain disruptions have eased, instability is seemingly a permanent feature of the national and global economies. As such, Cabinet decision makers need reliable tools that can be used to understand historical trends in material pricing and forecast future short-term variability in commodities markets. Equipped with this information, KYTC can proactively devise and implement strategies to mitigate future impacts of price increases and supply chain disruptions. To arm the Cabinet with the data it needs to make judicious investment and program management decisions, Kentucky Transportation Center (KTC) researchers have developed two Tableau-based dashboards — a Unit Bid Dashboard and a National Commodity Trends Dashboard. These dashboards house historical pricing data for essential highway construction inputs both at the state and national levels and give users the ability to develop one-year price forecasts. To ensure these dashboards play a role in future decision making, they should be updated regularly.

Report Date

7-2025

Report Number

KTC-25-17

Digital Object Identifier

https://doi.org/10.13023/ktc.rr.2025.17

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