Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering (BBGE)

Boxwood, 2009

Boxwood and Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering (BBGE)

Summary

Winner of MCA Awards 2010
Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering (BBGE) was showing solid performance in a competitive market but wanted to break out of a pattern of steady but unspectacular growth and marginal profitability. With Boxwood as their partners, they embarked on an ambitious programme of transformational change to increase revenue and profit and transform the way the organisation worked in order to secure their place as Industry Leaders. Whilst BBGE’s industry experience and technical skills were as important as ever, they recognised that additional skills would be required to initiate and sustain a real transformation to the business. Throughout the programme, Boxwood worked closely with BBGE staff to transfer and embed these key skills: the design and implementation of change so that it really sticks even in difficult and resistant environments, a robust approach to project and programme management and a process improvement mindset together with the skills to deliver it. Boxwood and BBGE jointly designed and implemented a structured programme of change impacting all areas of the business from site operations to internal business processes, customers and suppliers. The journey was long and tough but after 20 months of working alongside Boxwood, BBGE could see that real change had taken place in their organisation, as demonstrated by uplifted financial results and a workforce with new skills and a new way of working that would continue the upward trend.

Opportunity faced by the client

In 2007 Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering was formed following the acquisition of Pennine Vibropiling by Stent Foundations, to provide a platform for further acquisition in the ground engineering discipline. Graham Wren, the MD of BBGE had the ambition to grow quickly through acquisition to become Industry Leaders in Ground Engineering – the company that everyone wants to work for and with. Whilst the two BBGE businesses were already well regarded and successful with solid performance and acceptable margins, the market was extremely competitive and the goal of Industry Leadership would only be achieved with a step change in performance and mindset, breaking out from traditional performance standards in construction. BBGE chose Boxwood as their partners for this transformation because of their track record in delivering such changes and their focus on capability development and skills transfer to their partners.

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