Company Overview

Balfour Beatty is a leading international infrastructure group that builds bridges, tunnels, roads, schools, hospitals, and energy centers to power everyday life. Founded in 1909, the company’s 26,000 employees span the U.K., U.S., and Hong Kong. Balfour Beatty is transforming its industry to meet new challenges while collaborating with governments, customers, and partners. The company delivers powerful solutions, building skylines and critical infrastructure at the heart of communities.

The Challenge

Balfour Beatty has created iconic buildings and infrastructure all over the world, driven by a commitment to new thinking and solutions, as well as a focus on creating a great employee experience. This commitment led Balfour Beatty to evaluate its IT Service Management operations through the lens of greater speed, efficiency, and cost savings. Prior to BMC, Balfour Beatty experienced two primary challenges with their IT service management solution: One, the solution was complicated and impractical for their end users, who are primarily on a construction site and not in an office. Two, the previous vendor was commercially rigid and less willing to adapt to the industry needs Balfour Beatty expressed.

Balfour Beatty knew they needed a change. The goal was to find tools that delivered anywhere and everywhere, at the office, at the construction site, even in the middle of the ocean. Services had to be available on any device and employee-friendly – while also simplifying everything from IT requests to integrations and even onboarding new hires. The company chose both BMC Helix ITSM and BMC Helix Digital Workplace to solve these challenges. 

“BMC had the desire to understand our business,” says Jon Ozanne, CIO at Balfour Beatty. “They took the time to step into a day in the life of our employees and design the front end to match the needs of our industry.”

The Solution

Balfour Beatty chose BMC Helix for its quality, simplicity, and reliability, Ozanne says. When working in a low-margin business, cost is always a consideration. But having a true partner is even more important, according to Ozanne. “I was looking for a partner that understood value for money,” he says. “We wanted a partner that understood Balfour Beatty’s important metrics, somebody that would work alongside us.” 

Migrating to BMC Helix went both to plan and cost, with zero downtime. “The relationship between Balfour Beatty and BMC is defined by what we do, not by what we say – and what we do has been really productive for five years,” says Ozanne.

Over the past five years, BMC Helix ITSM has been rapidly adopted and is now implemented across 12 lines of business. BMC solutions support not just IT services but also human resources, finance, facilities, procurement and beyond. BMC Helix ITSM has become the unified solution across the enterprise, whether an employee has a payroll inquiry or needs a new laptop. 

“From an end-user point of view, they no longer see the boundaries between HR and IT,” explains Jon Ozanne. “Having a common set of workflows across so many areas of business has broken down siloes and eliminated employee angst around the processes.”

The Results

At Balfour Beatty, the onboarding process for new hires is now completely automated. Employees joining the company are training and learning about the organization via BMC Helix. New hires are also getting essential equipment, such as laptops and mobile phones, on their first day at a rate approaching 100 percent. 

With the ability to build custom services, Balfour Beatty has created a user-friendly ordering catalog for employees. The simple, streamlined solution includes accommodations for employees who may require a customized work set-up. “They’ve come forward saying how much easier it is to use the catalog and get the equipment they need,” Ozanne says. “It demonstrates how really good service elevates the whole perception of the IT experience.”

In addition to the new hire experience improvement, Balfour Beatty automated 30 percent of the daily requests that come into the IT service desk, and they achieved an 85 percent automation of IT kit and peripheral requests. Automated self-service workflows can be accessed from any device from virtually any location, which has contributed to a 61 percent reduction in incident resolution time.

“It brings predictability, and it allows the IT and HR experts to focus on more value-added activities instead of monitoring routine processes,” says Ozanne.

Dashboards and reports can now be effortlessly created and shared with colleagues, providing a clear view of issues, tracking progress, and fostering innovation. Users have the flexibility to easily customize dashboards, reducing dependency on developers and subject matter expertise. This enhanced real-time reporting visibility extends beyond team managers to include first-line analysts, empowering teams to respond quickly to demand. 

But most importantly, Ozanne and his team’s efforts have led to an employee satisfaction rate approaching 95 percent.

Looking forward, Balfour Beatty plans to expand their usage of BMC Helix ITSM by introducing BMC HelixGPT, an AI-powered solution that enables virtual agents. “We would love to leverage the benefits of BMC HelixGPT,” says Ozanne. “We’ve tried chatbots in the past. I am expecting BMC HelixGPT to give the resolver of an issue all of the information they could need at their fingertips, including what’s happened in the past, what we know about the user, and what our system logs are saying.”

BMC Helix is used enterprise-wide for back-end services such as IT and human resources. The next step could be BMC Helix Edge on the front end of the business at work sites to collect and analyze operational data. “I think BMC Helix Edge is really interesting for us within a construction environment,” says Ozanne. “Construction sites today are massively different from 10 years ago. We've got sensors on the people, on the equipment, on the cabins, on the vehicles. What they're doing is collecting data, and all that data needs to be managed. The BMC Helix Edge product looks really interesting in that space.”

Balfour Beatty continues to measure its technology innovation to ensure safety and quality, eliminate waste, and avoid repetition to keep costs down. “Technology is becoming fundamental to how we deliver construction. If we can use technology to ensure that we’re getting things done right the first time, that is going to be significant,” Ozanne says. “We need to leave our environments in a better position than we found them. If we can eliminate waste in all of our activities and bring technology to the challenge, we are going to be hugely successful.”