Remove the ‘boring’ jobs – Balfour Beatty’s approach to digital tech

When employees tell management what they dislike about their role, work can be done to improve things with digital technology, meaning companies get better results from their workforce and the tech they’re investing in.

“We’re not asking people to fill in a form and pretending that we’ve digitised a process […] Overnight, we ripped out some wholesale processes that were no longer required”

That’s the view of Balfour Beatty director of data and digital technology James Veitch, who explains the contractor’s strategy for moving towards a digital future.

“The phrase we like to use is ‘automate the boring stuff’,” he says. “The problem with digital is, if you’re not careful, people can see it is as a threat.”

In an interview with Construction News, the digital boss and former head of financial planning and analysis at the firm explains how the contractor’s bottom-up approach is reaping rewards when it comes to maximising employees’ time and paying the supply chain faster. He also urges clients to take a “mature” approach to help Balfour and the wider industry innovate.

Developing its own app

Moving to digital processes may involve telling people to do something differently from how they’ve been doing it for years. Without careful planning, the change can feel threatening. Moreover, as Veitch explains, the switch often risks repeating existing processes for no real benefit. Instead, Balfour has set out to identify things that people dislike in their work, and then to improve on them.

Balfour’s director of data and digital technology James Veitch

One example of this is a health and safety application developed by the contractor. The app, called Observations, removes a lot of the paperwork in reporting processes; it is designed to keep people on site doing their jobs rather than in offices filling in forms. Observations – downloadable freely on app stores – enables reporting to ‘celebrate the good’, ‘fix the bad’ and learn lessons from both.

“All the data we need is in the app,” Veitch says. “We’re not asking people to fill in a form and pretending that we’ve digitised a process because we’ve taken something that’s on a clipboard and put it on a Word document […] Overnight, we ripped out some wholesale processes that were no longer required.”

And this approach has been a success, he adds. “[The app] evolved over time to the point where key clients such as Transport for London were asking to use it. It doesn’t force you to have a Balfour credential – it’s designed so members of the public walking past our sites can say there’s something I don’t like or there’s something I do like, and I will submit some feedback.”

Speeding up payments

The development of bespoke digital technology has its appeal to a contractor such as Balfour Beatty, given that its size requires tech to be used on a scale unmatched in the industry. Last year, the company announced it had worked with specialist firm MSite to develop biometric identities for people on its projects, enabling contactless site entry, monitoring of attendance and alerts for breaches of social distancing during the pandemic.

There are plans to extend the use of the app to other measures, including notification of entry into exclusion zones around plant.

The size and influence of Balfour’s vast supply chain further shapes its approach to digital tech, Veitch says, requiring it to bring others on board with digital ways of working.

“There’s always a concern with the contractual model in that you don’t always get the value for your innovation […] Where’s my incentive to constantly innovate?”

“We’re disproportionality investing in it from our side and we’re giving our learnings to our partners because we’ve got to take them with us,” he continues. “80 per cent of our work on site is arguably driven by our supply chain, so in many ways I cannot digitise my process without bringing my supply chain with me. I don’t always control who my supply chain bring on site, but I need to take responsibility for the quality of their output, the safety of their work and the safety associated [with it].”

One way the firm is doing this is by moving towards the widespread use of electronic goods-received notes – removing the need for paper audit trails. Balfour has worked with supplier Aggregate Industries to develop a completely paperless receipt system for transactions. This came about after assessing the downsides of the job from several perspectives.

Balfour’s drones in action

Veitch explains the advantages: “If I order something, I’d like to have surety it’s there at a certain time without having to call a site office, who then call someone else; once it’s received, I want to know it’s received. I want to record the cost at my end, I want to be able to pay you on time, I don’t want to have to wait a week for the paper to get 71km along the M4.”

The influence of the prompt-payment code and some clients’ use of project bank accounts are also drivers for the increased use of digital methods, he says, adding: “The sooner I can record a cost in some cases, the sooner I can get paid.”

Incentives from clients

In 2017, Balfour Beatty outlined a major vision for the future in a document called Innovation 2050 – a digital future for the infrastructure industry. Among its predictions was that business models would change; there would be pan-industry partnerships with tech giants; and most site tasks would be delivered by robots. Among its recommendations were that customers should support innovation.

Asked whether clients are supporting such innovations yet, Veitch says approaches differ. “People like Highways England are very mature customers – they actively encourage innovation, they have funding available. In some cases it does work quite well.”

But those with an older business model of placing cost above value are often not as helpful. “There’s always a concern with the contractual model in that you don’t always get the value for your innovation,” he says. After demonstrated an innovation on a project to a client, there is sometimes an assumption that costs will fall, meaning a race to the bottom; this leaves him asking: “Where’s my incentive to constantly innovate?”

He notes that innovations in health and safety and environmental standards may be big developments, but they are not always recognised in current contractual models.

Balfour has also made use of BIM technology

Requirements by clients on jobs where Balfour is in a joint venture can also be double-edged for a contractor of its size: while many innovations have arisen from such partnerships, when it comes to cost and efficiencies, a saving of a few thousand pounds on a single job is nowhere near as important as developing solutions that can be done at scale across a range of schemes.

“If you’re not careful, there’s a lot of reinvention of wheels,” Veitch says. “Procurement requirements can drive a different way of doing things – for example, we’ve already got an integrated site-management system [but] if [a client] wants a different system [on a particular project], any work that I’ve done on investing that into a wider ecosystem gets wasted.”

Ultimately, he says digital innovation is about “trying to make sure you’re building solutions in a way that they can be deployed across your operations so you’ve got economies of scale”.