Bechtel Telecoms

Background

Bechtel Telecommunications is a unit of Bechtel Corporation, the largest design company, the second largest construction contractor, and the largest construction management firm in the United States—and a major player in over 50 countries worldwide.

The internet boom led to a surge in demand for telecommunications infrastructure, and Bechtel Telecoms was involved with many of the largest projects.

Since they were building the infrastructure, Bechtel Telecoms wanted to see if there were ways to use internet-based technologies to improve efficiency.

Project Summary

Telecom projects needed to ramp up incredible fast and coordinate between dozens of different locations at once. Interviews revealed that Bechtel Telecoms' main pain points were 1) getting enough qualified people hired and to job sites in the time required and 2) getting site status reports back to a central location for analysis. Bechtel was using a number of different ways finding workers, but there was no centralized place for contractors to go to get updates on job opportunities. Getting information back from the sites was a paper-based manual process.

A public portal site was created to address the human resources needs. Finalized job openings were served from existing HR databases, but the site also allowed Bechtel to display likely job openings before new projects were finalized, dramatically cutting down on ramp-up time. A custom content management system was created to make updating and managing job information seamless.

A powerful intranet was designed to address the information flow issues. Because network access varied by site and mangers had different work styles, the site was designed to accept multiple times of inputs. Workers could update status reports by uploading standard document templates, filling out web forms, or syncing hand-held devices. All information flowed into a master scheduler, management, and analysis tool for the project management team.