Balfour Beatty using Asta Powerproject to rewrite programme management procedures
The UK’s largest construction contractor, Balfour Beatty, is using Asta Powerproject to run simultaneous preconstruction and construction projects with agility and efficiency.
The company believes Asta Powerproject is essential to achieving consistency in its programme management. Our market-leading planning and scheduling software allows Balfour Beatty’s project leaders to cost and load programmes to meet strategic goals.
Balfour Beatty is also rolling out Asta Vision across its UK business in 2023 to improve high-level project visibility and analyse how effectively decisions drive progress towards its business targets.
Asta Powerproject and Vision are enabling Balfour Beatty to:
- Establish a single source of truth to ensure projects hit key milestones
- Gain real-time site feedback via Asta SiteProgress
- Analyse performance at-a-glance to determine how programmes are costed and loaded
- Introduce common coding practices, so projects are planned and managed consistently across the business
Building towards a strong future
Balfour Beatty has been delivering highly complex infrastructure schemes for over 110 years. It’s the UK’s biggest construction contractor in terms of revenue, posting an underlying profit of £18 million in the first six months of 2022.
Balfour Beatty’s UK business is in a period of major operational change. Pivotal updates include rewriting programme management procedures to ensure consistency of planning and delivery of execution with all its UK building projects.
As one of two company planning and project management systems, Asta Powerproject is central to Balfour Beatty’s strategic improvements.
A key user within the business is Senior Planning Manager Rishi Jagota. He uses Asta Powerproject software to manage pre-construction and construction work on multiple projects – including a student housing development for the University of Sussex.
“There are a multitude of functions which Asta Powerproject is capable of providing for our business. It’s a very powerful yet concise tool.”
Rishi Jagota, Senior Planning Manager, Balfour Beatty
Keeping every project on the right track
Day to day, Balfour Beatty uses Asta Powerproject to drive its construction programmes and report on progress.
Each project has a series of ‘gates’ – milestones that the senior leadership team needs to sign off – which the company has converted into Asta Powerproject workflows. Balfour Beatty also tracks real-time progress against project baselines, identifying critical drivers for getting programmes back on track if timelines start to slip.
“Asta Powerproject is user-friendly for editing templates and workstreams; it’s self-intuitive. We can analyse progress clearly throughout each project and use that information to inform our decisions.”
To help projects stay on course, Rishi and his colleagues use Asta Powerproject’s SiteProgress to share information with site project teams. Contractors can upload photos and post updates from any remote location, which helps manage time more efficiently.
“SiteProgress is a useful tool, as we do not have to send spreadsheets back and forth. Instead, we can interface with managers and site staff to create and validate a single source of truth.”
Using Asta Powerproject to set strategic goals
Asta Powerproject also plays a more profound role in the strategic development of Balfour Beatty’s UK business.
As a tier one main contractor, Balfour Beatty runs multiple projects simultaneously, managed by a team of planners. Rishi’s team is developing a common coding theme for assigning tasks and resources to each project to establish a consistent operational framework that planning teams across the company can easily implement.
“We want to align our strategic goals and visions with performance analysis to determine how we cost and load our programmes.”
As part of this project, Balfour Beatty is trialling Asta Vision, flowing project data into a single point of truth, stored securely in the cloud.
Each programme has its own separate file, but all active projects sit on the main dashboard, which appears as a summary page when users log onto Asta Vision. This high-level view gives senior management access to critical information at a glance to track the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of each project.
“Our senior leadership team asks for forensic planning information to understand the status of projects, key risks, where programmes are against the curve and whether we are going to finish ahead or behind. Vision allows us to get all projects into a portfolio that everyone can access, so we can understand workflows and can report in a consistent format.”
Asta Vision’s business intelligence feature will also play a pivotal role in helping teams to extract information in graph format, to present to others in the company.
A digital platform for consistent growth
Although it is early days using Asta Vision, Balfour Beatty plans to roll out the software across the UK business as it introduces common coding practices. Even long-time users of competitor software see the advantages of using Asta Powerproject to manage programmes efficiently and drive strategic growth.
“We are a blue chip company, so we should be at the forefront of the industry. Asta Powerproject and Vision will enable us to share learnings and best practices to bring greater consistency to Balfour Beatty’s construction programmes.”
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