ESM Efficiency: How Balfour Beatty delivered a better digital employee experience for 21,000 users – CIO

Balfour Beatty finances, develops, builds, and maintains vital infrastructure projects – such as airports, hospitals, schools, and office buildings – on three continents. The company was responsible for Britain’s largest road project, the £1.5 billion A14 improvement, and built the $429 million North Metro Commuter Rail Line in Denver, Colorado. It’s an enormous operation and, given the size and scope of Balfour Beatty’s business, delivering services to its 24,500+ global employees is complex. Due to labor-intensive and often manual processes, the company’s IT team struggled to keep up with employee service requests.

The Balfour Beatty IT team handled 36,000 tickets per year just before the 2020 global pandemic. Once public health and safety measures kicked in, the added complexity of supporting a suddenly remote workforce added additional challenges to an already complex situation. With the company embarking on a major cloud migration, IT leadership knew that the infrastructure giant needed the assistance of automation.

Following a rigorous process to determine the company’s needs and assess IT service management solutions, Balfour Beatty chose BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management with BMC Helix Digital Workplace. Balfour Beatty valued BMC’s ServiceOps platform approach of integrating service and operations capabilities to deliver intelligent automation for simplified IT workflows without manual intervention. Additionally, Balfour Beatty wanted to improve digital employee experiences through unified service catalogs, automated processes, and faster inquiry response times. 

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, combined with BMC Helix Digital Workplace, enabled Balfour Beatty to consolidate its service catalog from more than 100 items to less than 30, making it far easier for employees to navigate. Its patching and technology sunsetting capabilities became faster and more proactive and just as Balfour Beatty hoped, its IT teams have been able to integrate the platform with nearly all its current systems.

“We were doing thousands of manual requests for things like hardware orders, mobile orders, and IT access requests before BMC Helix,” said David Leigh, IT Service Desk Manager. “All that’s largely been automated now.”

Balfour Beatty also gained deeper visibility into IT support. For instance, it now has a holistic, historical view of all tickets, which enables the company to identify trends and long-term issues for continuous improvement. It also has a macro view of its infrastructure to assist with planning its ongoing cloud migration.

The impact has been profound. Since its deployment with BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management and BMC Helix Digital Workplace in the spring of 2020, Balfour Beatty has:

• Automated more than 36,000 tickets, doubling year-over-year growth in automation
• Reduced year-over-year incident resolution by 61%
• Automated over 85% of its IT kit and peripheral fulfillment.

“Helix has great flexibility around how we can build very custom services through to the different integrations with multitudes of third-party products,” said Wayne Hardman, Balfour Beatty’s Front Office Applications Manager. “No matter what the business wants, we can build an automated service today.

For more information on how BMC Helix Service Management can automate your IT service workflows and delight employees with personalized experiences, visit us here.