Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering
Background
Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering comprises Stent, Pennine and Testal. Stent and Pennine are piling and ground improvement specialists respectively, while Testal offers testing packages in related fields.
The company provides ground engineering solutions in a range of sectors, from rail and healthcare to housing and commercial property. Previous and current projects include Arsenal Emirates Stadium, East London Line, M1 and King's Cross redevelopment. The company employs over 600 staff and combined turnover in 2007 exceeded £91m.
The Issue
The Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering Plant Department in the East Midlands is responsible for the organisation of the plant which it hires out to the trading companies, as well as the repair and maintenance function. Like many companies Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering used manual worksheets to control their assets and track the whereabouts of the plant, as well as using an in-house written access database that controlled the workshop function. It became apparent that an integrated system that could offer both hire and workshop functionality was required. It was also extremely important to Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering that the new system provide a bar coding function to accommodate the size of the site and the enormous amount of consumable items warehoused.
The management went to the market and looked at three potential suppliers of rental management software.
The Solution
inspHire was asked to submit a proposal and following a detailed selection process, Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering selected inspHire Corporate Edition to work with them.
With inspHire installed and implemented, the staff found that due to its ease of use and intuitive functionality they ‘picked things up’ really quickly. The additional rich feature set of inspHire Corporate Edition enabled the staff to complete tasks more quickly, freeing them up from cumbersome manual practices.
Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering was aware of inspHire’s Mobile Working development and this was key to their decision in selecting the inspHire rental management system.
Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering operates inspHire Mobile Working
On such a vast site with a large inventory of consumable items, the task of stocktaking was an awesome one. The plant was literally closed for 2 days whilst stocktaking took place. Now, with the inspHire Mobile Working application in place, the staff are able to scan items both in the warehouse and around the site with the mobile hand held devices (HHD) transferring the information, live, direct to the inspHire system enabling them to maintain accurate stock information on a day to day basis. The person responsible for booking items in and out decides, whilst physically surveying the equipment, which item would logistically be the most convenient to allocate to the rental contract that appears on the screen of the HHD and confirms that the equipment has an ‘available’ status. When the item is returned, the off-hire is processed by the HHD forwarding the relevant live information back to the inspHire system. The system is also being used for everyday enquiries of the equipment around the site as well as for the stocktaking activity.
“Our processes are now far more flexible and speedy, we can scan bar codes, tap quantities into the HHD and all this feeds live into the inspHire system. We are moving towards a perpetual inventory count so that we do not have to halt our operations whilst stocktaking is performed”. John Lunnon, Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering
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