Sustainability report 2009

Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important consideration for customers and meeting customer needs is fundamental to Balfour Beatty’s long-term future. We believe that the way we deliver more sustainable solutions will be a key differentiator in increasingly competitive markets. Through our scale and leadership, we can positively influence the growth of these markets. Over time, growing numbers of customers will want sustainability to be part of the way we meet their requirements. This is already particularly evident in Hong Kong, where our focus on sustainability is helping us to win work.

It is vital that we develop and refine our culture of genuinely understanding customer needs and sharing best practice across the Group. The low carbon and resource efficient economy of the future will open up new markets for us.

We also need to innovate to enhance the service we offer to customers and to be recognised as a market-leading business.

Our 2020 sustainability vision in this area is to:

• Deliver an appropriate range of products and services that respond to the needs and aspirations of customers and a sustainable society
• Work in partnership with customers to help them align their sustainability goals to society’s expectations and to environmental limits

In order to ensure that we continue to meet customer needs, we undertake a range of activities:

• We evolve our strategy to meet customers’ requirements. In our experience, major infrastructure owners increasingly want to work with integrated suppliers. Following the acquisition of Parsons Brinckerhoff, Balfour Beatty has substantial businesses operating across the infrastructure lifecycle in professional services, construction services, support services and infrastructure investments, which will help to fulfil this customer need
• We undertake regular customer satisfaction surveys to ensure that we are performing to a high level and are exceeding customers’ requirements
• We share knowledge across the Group to ensure that best practice and innovative ways of meeting and solving complex problems are captured
• We have close relationships with customers though relationship managers across the Group who maintain an open, two-way dialogue
• We carefully monitor our order book, which is a good indicator of the health of the business. At the end of 2009, our conservatively-calculated order book stood at £14.1bn, which does not include contract extensions, framework contracts or long-term concession income

In the area of innovation, we:

• Develop product and process innovations within all of our operating companies
• At Group-level, we drive best practice through the innovation forum and are developing more sophisticated knowledge management systems and processes, which is particularly important as the Group gets bigger and more geographically diverse

The 2012 expectations in our sustainability roadmap set out our plans for meeting and where possible, exceeding, our customers’ sustainability aspirations by:

• Formally confirming the sustainability objectives on all projects at the outset of engagement with the customer
• Identifying sustainability solutions achievable within existing project budgets
• Presenting sustainability options for customers, where no sustainability objectives exist, for their consideration

We will also include sustainability considerations in our project risk and opportunity reviews. Further development is also needed to create key performance indicators to track the value of sustainability products and services delivered by our businesses and those projects where sustainability deliverables have been agreed by the customer.