Balfour Beatty

Industry: Construction

Project Scope: Secure Scanning of 4,000 Archive Boxes

Balfour Beatty, a global leader in construction and infrastructure, continues to set the benchmark in digital transformation within their industry. With a vision to enhance efficiency and compliance, they embarked on a project to digitise 4,000 archive boxes containing crucial business documentation. These included large format drawings, contracts, worksheets, invoices, and other business-critical records. Balfour Beatty chose Plan2Scan as their partner for this important project, demonstrating their commitment to digitisation and the Golden Thread initiative.

Project Drivers

Market Leadership in Digitisation: As a leader in the construction industry, Balfour Beatty aimed to solidify its position by embracing cutting-edge digital technologies. By digitising historical documentation, they sought to improve operational efficiency and set a precedent for innovation.
Improved Recall of Business-Critical Documentation: With vast amounts of paper documentation, locating key records quickly had become a challenge. Digitisation aimed to improve the accessibility of critical documents, ensuring faster recall and improved decision-making processes.
Enhanced Audit Compliance: Regulatory audits, both internal and external, are crucial to maintaining the company’s high standards. By digitising their documents, Balfour Beatty aimed to improve the pass rates of audits by ensuring accurate, easily retrievable, and organised documentation.
Reduced Physical Storage Costs: The costs of storing thousands of archive boxes were substantial. By digitising their records, Balfour Beatty planned to reduce physical storage needs and associated costs significantly, freeing up space and resources.
Improved Operational Effectiveness: The overall goal was to create a more streamlined operation, with digitised records contributing to enhanced business agility, collaboration, and workflow efficiency.

Plan2Scan’s Role in the Project

Plan2Scan was tasked with handling the entire digitisation process, ensuring that Balfour Beatty’s critical documentation was scanned, stored, and shared securely and efficiently. The project required a meticulous approach given the volume and importance of the records. Here’s how Plan2Scan managed the project from start to finish:

Preparation of Documents – Before scanning could begin, Plan2Scan prepared the documents for digitisation. This included organising and removing staples, paperclips, and other obstructions from the papers to ensure seamless scanning. Each archive box was carefully labelled and categorised for easy retrieval during the scanning process.
Document Sorting and Categorisation – Given the diverse range of document types, including large format drawings, contracts, and invoices, the Plan2Scan team carefully sorted and categorised the documents into predefined types. This ensured that each document was processed appropriately, enhancing both the quality and organisation of the digitised files.
Secure Scanning Process – Utilising a range of high-quality scanning equipment, Plan2Scan undertook the secure digitisation of the documents. Specialised large-format scanners were used for oversized drawings, while high-speed document scanners processed contracts, invoices, and worksheets. Every document was scanned with attention to detail, ensuring clarity and accuracy.

Security and Data Protection – Given the sensitive nature of the documentation, only security-checked staff were assigned to the project. Plan2Scan’s team adhered to strict confidentiality protocols, ensuring that Balfour Beatty’s records were handled with the highest levels of security throughout the scanning process.
Indexing and File Management – Once scanned, Plan2Scan indexed the PDF files by document type and metadata, ensuring that each file could be easily searched and retrieved. This process significantly enhanced Balfour Beatty’s ability to locate specific records quickly, supporting their goals of improved document recall and audit readiness.
Secure File Sharing – After scanning and indexing were complete, the digitised documents were securely shared with Balfour Beatty using encrypted file-sharing methods. This ensured that sensitive information remained protected throughout the transfer process, in compliance with data security regulations.
Secure Document Destruction – Upon receiving confirmation that all digital records were accurate and complete, Plan2Scan facilitated the secure destruction of the physical documents. This process followed industry best practices, ensuring that sensitive paper records were disposed of in a secure and environmentally responsible manner.

Results and Impact

Through the successful completion of this large-scale project, Balfour Beatty has positioned itself at the forefront of digital transformation in the construction industry. Key outcomes include:

Faster Recall of Documents: Digitised records are now readily accessible, reducing the time required to retrieve key information.
Increased Compliance in Audits: The organised, easily searchable digital files have contributed to higher pass rates in internal and external audits.
Cost Savings: By eliminating the need for physical storage, Balfour Beatty has significantly reduced their overhead costs.
Enhanced Operational Efficiency: The digitisation project has streamlined Balfour Beatty’s operations, allowing for more agile decision-making and improved document management.

Plan2Scan is proud to have partnered with Balfour Beatty on this transformative project, supporting their journey towards operational excellence and industry leadership in digitisation.

"We only had a small volume of documents to scan but were not made to feel like a small customer. The documents needed to be scanned in a secure location and consisted of A4 to A2 plans that needed scanning in high quality to ensure all details were captured. We were very happy with the service and quality of the digital files that were retuned and would us Plan2Scan again."

"Plan2Scan introduced us to OCR technology software that actually reads the documents as they are being scanned, this meant we could scan the drawings in batches, simply open the PDF and do a search on the drawing number we were after."

"We wanted to move our DocuWare and Scanning support to a provider that could bring our document management to the next level. Plan2Scan helped to utilise tools within DocuWare which has helped to speed up the scanning process. This efficiency gain has been passed back to us and now not only has the turnaround of documents appearing in the system been improved but our monthly invoices have also decreased."

"We were re-designing our office and needed to scan some secure documents that we no longer had space for. Plan2Scan were more than happy to talk us through the scanning journey and provided reassurances that the work would be completed professionally and to a high standard. We were not disappointed; the digital files were returned with a higher quality than we had imagined and well presented. We now run monthly collections with Plan2Scan and are very happy with the service."

"We needed to scan a range of business documents that we had to keep for an extended period for GDPR purposes. We contacted Plan2Scan who took us through the scanning process and helped provide some guidance around how to scan the documents without it being expensive (unlikely we would access these documents in the future) while still ensuring the scan quality was high and we could access and locate files easily should we need to. Files were collected, scanned and returned to us exactly as promised we would recommend Plan2Scan and use them again."

Balfour Beatty

Project Drivers

Plan2Scan’s Role in the Project

Results and Impact

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