Balfour Beatty uses GenAI to transform its work order assurance process

Streamlining reviews of all company-wide work orders

Balfour Beatty Communities is one of the largest providers of military family housing in the US. As part of their operations to maintain these residences, Balfour Beatty processes more than 500,000 work orders annually.

Timely and accurate work order handling is essential to providing a comfortable and well-maintained home for housing residents. Work orders must be processed according to company policies to ensure repairs are performed correctly and accurately documented according to project agreements. The challenge was how to establish an assurance process to perform timely reviews on a half a million work orders each year. Previously, the assurance process was done by approximately 70 service center coordinators and managers across the US. Balfour Beatty Communities asked NTT DATA: Is there a better solution?

NTT DATA and Balfour Beatty created a generative AI that streamlines the assurance review process and enhances team performance. The solution performs 17 checks on each work order using a combination of machine learning and generative AI to mirror the review of each work order with a +98% accuracy. The reviews are performed daily and detailed results and trends are reported using Microsoft’s PowerBI platform each morning by 8:00.

Building a GenAI-powered tool for compliance review

Balfour Beatty Communities partnered with NTT DATA to explore how GenAI could help them automate and improve the work order compliance review process. By combining Microsoft Azure infrastructure with OpenAI’s latest large language models (LLMs), we rapidly developed a proof-of-concept (POC) for a GenAI tool to assist Balfour Beatty’s Service Center team in improving the speed, quality and consistency of the work order review process. Based on the success of this effort, our data and AI practice team moved the work order compliance POC into production. The final solution includes the following:

• Automated pipeline for work order review: Leveraged GenAI capabilities to flag daily work orders for potential errors or noncompliance with company policies, ensuring highly accurate and consistent results
• Microsoft Azure platform enablement: Partnered with Microsoft to establish and build out the Azure tenant used to maintain the compute, storage and orchestration of the work order AI system
• Value-focused dashboards: Developed several dashboard capabilities using Microsoft PowerBI to review the daily results and trends for thousands of work orders across a team of managers and coordinators
• Security and governance: Prioritized commitment to security measures and governance frameworks to mitigate risks while ensuring responsible development with innovative technology
• AI feedback mechanism: Created a control and feedback system to enable continuous improvement of AI results
• Product backlog: Centralized list of future features for prioritization and adaptability in continuous improvement of the initial work order AI solution

Improved compliance and risk management

Balfour Beatty Communities’ AI-powered solution helps them review all of their more than 500,000 work orders fast, consistently and reliably. This improves their overall efficiency and risk management.

Accuracy

The GenAI solution is 98%+ accurate when compared to a human expert.

Speed

The GenAI model can process thousands of work orders in a fraction of the time it takes the existing team of 70 individuals, ensuring that Balfour Beatty Communities will be able to complete reviews for 100% of the work orders it receives each year.

Consistency

All work orders are reviewed exactly the same way compared to human reviews that can change based on factors such as differences in knowledge and distractions.

Transparency

Microsoft’s PowerBI platform is used to display the results daily to Balfour Beatty Communities’ team across the United States by 8:00 am each morning, providing clear and complete transparency of performance.

Auditable process

The GenAI platform is fully auditable. Each AI response cites specific company policies and procedures to make clear compliance decisions.