Company Overview

Balfour Beatty is a leading international infrastructure group based in the U.K. with capabilities that span construction and related support services. With 24,500 employees serving the U.K., U.S., and Hong Kong, Balfour Beatty finances, develops, builds, and maintains the vital facilities that enable societies and economies to grow. Projects include roads and railways; airports, seaports, tunnels, and bridges; health and education facilities; heating, lighting, power, and water; and places to live and work.

Balfour Beatty has developed landmark projects including the £1.5 billion A14 improvement scheme, Britain’s biggest road project; Hong Kong’s HK$5.5 billion world-class harbor theater project for the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority; and the $429 million North Metro Commuter Rail line in Colorado.

The Opportunity

With high-profile engagements on three continents and customers that include government departments and agencies, regulated utilities, and the private sector, Balfour Beatty was looking for a way to make its operational and IT processes more efficient. The organization recognized that its manual and phone-based service delivery structure operated too slowly and with the onset of the pandemic, was no longer an efficient, effective way to serve customers operating in far-flung and often outdoor locations.

When the pandemic created a suddenly mostly remote workforce and new barriers to user engagement, automation became an appealing alternative way to deliver services quickly and anywhere in the world. Balfour Beatty was also embarking on cloud migration and needed a full view of its infrastructure and their relationships, something none of its existing toolsets could provide. Automation was a highly desired capability in this solution area.

The Solution

After a thorough needs analysis and assessment of likely vendors, Balfour Beatty eliminated another vendor from consideration due to its more fixed, rigid structure and hands-off service approach. The organization selected BMC Helix ITSM because it provides comprehensive service and support as part of its solution delivery model and offers extensive customization capabilities.

The BMC Helix end-to-end, cloud-based service management solution empowers Balfour Beatty to deliver an excellent user experience to both its external customers and internal end users. With the solutions, Balfour Beatty can expand and integrate line-of-business (LOB) workflows enterprise- wide, from IT to finance to fleet management and beyond, all through incremental additions to the BMC Helix platform.

Business Outcome

From its implementation in the spring of 2020 through to today, Balfour Beatty has been empowered by its use of BMC Helix to take its services directly to the end user—in virtually any location (office, construction site, the middle of the ocean, etc.) and on any device, such as a tablet, smartphone, or laptop. The company leveraged the solution set’s automation capabilities to revamp its ordering catalog and used BMC Helix Virtual Agent to create an intuitive service offering that helped transform user engagement from phone-based, manual interactions to multichannel, dynamic self-service.

The automation has also allowed Balfour Beatty to speed ticketing and respond quickly to requests, not just in IT but across the business to areas like human resources. Currently deployed to 21,000 active user accounts in myriad departments, with 200 staff who use the IT side of BMC Helix, the solution has positively impacted three key areas of the business:

People:

• Deploying a BMC Enterprise Education subscription to help onboard all users to BMC Helix
• Giving construction staff a digital identity with the services and facilities they need to do their jobs
• Freeing up eight full-time employees from providing phone support services to instead focus on innovation and more interesting projects and activities
• Boosting customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores

Processes:

• Automating 36,000 tickets, doubling year-over-year growth
• Reducing incident resolution time year over year by 61 percent
• Automating over 85 percent of IT kit and peripheral fulfillment

Technology:

• Producing easily shareable reports and dashboards
• Providing a holistic and historical view of tickets to identify long-term issues
• Improving patching and sunsetting of technology
• Delivering a macro view of infrastructure and their relationships to assist with cloud migration activities
• Integrating with almost all of the company’s current systems
• Consolidated a service catalog and reducing 75 percent of items with BMC Helix Digital Workplace

Looking Ahead

Balfour Beatty plans to expand its use of BMC Helix ITSM across the business, including exploring more human resources use cases applications and developing new offerings to support mobile access to applications. It aims to increase self-service requests handled by BMC Helix Intelligent Automation from 22 percent to 40 percent within the next 12 months. BMC Helix Innovation Studio is helping the organization analyze its past requests and projects to gain insights for forecasting future trends and expanding innovation activities.