Balfour Beatty Achieves Estimating Excellence with Discipline, Judgement, and Digital Confidence 

Company Name: Balfour Beatty 

Location: UK, US, & Hong Kong 

Industry sector/s: Infrastructure; Construction 

Products used: RIB Candy & RIB CostX 

It’s about having the correct software, the correct processes and procedures, and using the coding systems set up in both Candy and CostX. 

Bill Mackie, Head of Estimating Major Projects and Highways, Balfour Beatty 

The Customer 

Balfour Beatty is a leading international contractor with 26,000 employees across the UK, US and Hong Kong, transforming the industry to meet the challenges of the future. The group delivers major projects, developing and maintaining public and private infrastructure projects in infrastructure – including military, housing and student accommodation assets, complex civil engineering, ground engineering, M&E, refurbishment, fit-out, and rail engineering projects. Support services include designing, upgrading, and maintaining critical national infrastructure with capabilities across electricity networks, railways, and highways. 

The Mission 

Balfour Beatty explored a modern response to modern complexities of rising scrutiny and commercial pressures in construction projects. Triggered by challenges like increasing scale of infrastructure, higher governance expectations, a need for accuracy, auditability, and more consistent estimating discipline across teams and generations in the UK, they were driven to develop a balanced approach to digital workflows that would enhance governance, transparency, defendable estimating outputs, and consistency in estimating across major infrastructure projects. Achieving all this while balancing structured workflows with seasoned, professional judgment has become essential across their portfolio.  

The Solution 

Balfour Beatty believed that decades of estimating excellence must play a role in the future development of the industry. Partnering with RIB Software to digitally enable estimating, they’ve transformed their estimating processes in a way that balances discipline and expertise. Their evolution from manual to digital is integrated across teams, embedding technology as an enabler of judgement rather than a replacement of experience and expertise. They were already using RIB Candy as their core estimating platform and added RIB CostX for 2D and 3D/BIM takeoff, model-based workflows, standardizing processes to support governance and transparency. 

The Result 

The digital transformation of Balfour Beatty’s estimating processes resulted in greater consistency across estimating outputs, and greater confidence. The process offered better support for complex alliance-based delivery with stronger governance and audit trails. The tools have proven efficacy on mega projects, as well as shown their value on everyday projects. With more structured processes available, this digital enablement is expected to support and inspire the next generation of estimators. 

The challenge is creating disciplined, repeatable processes while still preserving human judgement that remains central to good estimating. Tools alone can’t solve this, but they can support resilience, transparency, and strong governance. 

James Rickett, Head of Estimating, Balfour Beatty 

Supporting Teams with Consistency, Structure, and Transparency 

This is a story about estimating excellence, discipline, judgement, and digital confidence. It starts with estimators dealing with increasing scrutiny, risk, and technical complexity on major programs, and ends with stronger governance, enhanced accuracy, and consistent estimating discipline across generations of estimators. 

With programs growing in duration and regulatory visibility, Balfour Beatty’s estimators were under increasing pressure to produce defendable, transparent outputs at every stage. 

Sustaining excellence in estimation into the future 

A big challenge entered the fray in the form of generational turnover – new estimators enter the profession but lack experience as their older counterparts with decades of tacit knowledge leave. The pursuit of excellence in estimating must balance the contradiction of younger professionals bringing onboard lots of digital confidence but little estimating expertise. 

It’s equally challenging to attract people like school leavers and graduates without providing a clear, structured career pathway. It created an opportunity for firms to provide much-needed exposure for trainees coming onto projects as senior estimators. 

How Balfour Beatty laid the foundation for excellence: 

• RIB Candy supported their large, distributed teams with consistent processes, structured data, and transparent reporting. 

• They expanded their toolkit to include RIB CostX for integrated 2D and 3D takeoff as digital expectations grew. 

• The resulting model-based workloads slotted directly into their cost planning, creating a single version of truth across major programs. 

This is essential to help experienced estimators focus on insights, risk, and commercial decision-making. 

For Balfour Beatty, this is the definition of balance: they’ve effectively brought together the best of both worlds by combining the discipline, consistency, and transparency provided by digital tools like Candy and CostX with the professional intuition and judgement that sit at the heart of good estimating.  

We used to do things with a pen and pencil, but that never brought the consistency we needed. The confidence and estimate output were based upon the estimator’s experience, whereas today we don’t have those people around in construction. And it’s really difficult building teams. 

Bill Mackie, Head of Estimating Major Projects and Highways 

Building confidence and structure into estimating 

Balfour Beatty understood the power of their digital solutions to increase confidence for everyone involved, so that they use the tools to produce better estimates with more accurate costs. 

Going through the process highlighted for Mackie and Rickett the value of structured, consistent workflows across the entire estimating function. Modern infrastructure projects are much larger in size and scope than a decade ago. So, there is greater uncertainty and risk for modern estimators to factor in. Timelines don’t necessarily change, while clients tend to adjust their contracting models to maximize value. They increasingly prioritize assembly-proven teams early on and value competitive bidding with greater emphasis on track record of successful delivery. 

At this early stage of the process, a skilled estimator is essential, even if the price is weighted slightly less than quality. Most clients require bidders to address budget preparation and management of quality submission. It indicates an evolving role for the estimator: It’s no longer just about producing an estimate – it’s also about explaining and discussing that estimate with the wider team. 

Developing and refining the right solution for the project requires a very transparent and auditable pricing approach. Work packages typically go through several levels of assurance and review. Involving estimators here exposes them to the wider project team.  

This highlights the value that effective estimators bring: 

• They break down complex requirements to produce accurate pricing. 

• They often become central figures within the project team for as long as it takes to prepare a detailed estimate. 

• Estimators gain a deep understanding of the project’s complexities through this detailed work. 

• Their knowledge becomes extremely valuable as the project continues to evolve and adapt. 

With much of the most critical work still happening on site, clear and transparent knowledge transfer is essential for a successful project. 

Core estimator responsibilities remain largely the same, but the increasing scale and complexity of modern infrastructure projects demand that estimators now engage more across the project lifecycle. And their value is recognized beyond their own teams – by clients and other stakeholders too. Involving the estimating team in discussions enhances project collaboration. It improves accuracy and therefore exposes the project to less risk. 

The software enhances the user’s output – it isn’t there to replace the user. 

James Rickett, Head of Estimating 

Bringing consistency across multi-disciplinary teams 

Consistency in inputs and outputs is key to achieving control across complex projects. Balfour Beatty prizes commonality in approach and usage within the business, especially during preconstruction and for estimating teams. The digital tools must help set that up early in the process, and teams must strictly adhere to those procedures. 

Mackie notes the difference that Candy makes in this instance: its multi-coding capability allows activities and price breakdowns to be organized and linked together. All of this can be structured through standard master worksheets and standard resources to create strong consistency. But to make this work properly, the discipline must be introduced to the team early on. 

Similarly, CostX enables a common reporting approach, which is imperative. Here too, it’s easier to implement with a robust process and consistent procedures in place across the entire estimate, with teams responsible for takeoffs working closely with the estimating team. It’s critical that everyone follows the same process and the same approach. 

That consistency also allows the estimate to be integrated more easily, whether it’s being used internally for business purposes or externally for auditing. It provides clarity and transparency across all bids, which helps because large infrastructure bids are often broken down into many smaller (fragmented) packages.  

Their top takeaways from the experience? 

• If you can demonstrate consistency in the way everything is prepared, it makes life easier for everyone – from business governance through to the audit process. 

• Estimating is no longer just about the final number – it must now be transparent, traceable, and auditable. 

• Accurate estimating depends on quality input from across the project team and a clear, first-principles approach. 

First principles have always been important, but they need to be reinforced with project teams to dispel the misconception that estimating is some kind of mysterious or arbitrary process. Rather, it can help enforce discipline, guide judgement, and inspire the kind of confidence that drives excellence in estimating. 

The result is balance – that is, a balance between discipline and expertise, standardized methods supported by decades of personal experience. 

James Rickett