Balfour Beatty

Case study

Purchasing 5700 carbon-neutral remanufactured HP laptops, Balfour Beatty saved over £1m and significantly impacted their sustainability goals

Balfour Beatty is a global, British-headquartered FTSE 250 company and a key player in the field of construction. They finance, develop, build, and maintain the vital infrastructure that we all depend on and have done so for over a century.

The challenge

Like all companies, Balfour Beatty had an ongoing requirement for IT and they engaged with their suppliers and potential suppliers to fulfil that need. Balfour wanted to procure enough laptops for all their UK office and site based employees, to be used with their Windows 10 environment.

Their requirement was for the highest specification, best performing machine they could get for their budget. There were questions around asset tracking as well as taking the old laptops out of the business. Beyond this, they wanted to be assured there was enough volume and that the delivery of units could be staggered to meet their desires.

The process

Balfour Beatty are a Sustainability-minded company who have developed their own Sustainability strategy ‘Building New Futures’, however the evaluation of the laptops was carried out entirely on technical merit and any benefits beyond the performance were ignored.

As this was a new supplier and ‘type’ of laptop, Balfour Beatty had some questions and wanted to see some trial units before committing to their decision. Any queries or fears were allayed by the team at both Circular Computing and Procurri, the IT partner used in delivering the logistics.

The solution

Balfour Beatty purchased 5700 carbon-neutral remanufactured HP laptops from Circular Computing, enough for all their UK office and site based employees. These were predominantly the HP G3 model, with some HP G4s requested.

Due to the cost savings of remanufactured versus new, they were able to procure higher specification laptops for their budget. The laptops were complete with faster SSD disk and increased memory, so the performance was similar to latest generation units and this was delivered at a significant discount to the latest new models.

The solution from Circular Computing not only excelled against their demands in terms of operational performance, but provided a whole raft of sustainability benefits that the company are now celebrating.

In terms of the details, Procurri worked with the channel partner to tailor a white glove solution to deliver and asset track each unit. A remote workers swap solution was implemented, legacy laptops were collected, data erased and subsequently resold to further increase the savings.

THe Results

The units have now been in place for over a year, and in many cases the end users were not aware the devices were remanufactured – a great illustration of the ‘as new’ standard our units are remanufactured to.

Jon Ozanne, UK CIO of Balfour Beatty, had this to say about the company’s experience of Circular Computing’s laptops: “Firstly, our employees judge a machine on whether it works. When I have asked employees they were unaware they were using a remanufactured laptop, as when they arrived they were almost indistinguishable from new.”

“The overriding feedback is they feel the devices are better than what they had before. We know they're a high spec and that was a sales point for us. They are lighter and, once they knew about the sustainability benefits that were coming from this, I think people are generally supportive. The feedback's been great. 14 months down the line, and we're not seeing any volume of operational issues that would force me to think, have we made the right decision here?”

Jon Ozanne is committed to continued usage of Circular Computing’s remanufactured IT as “without question, based on our experiences it’s a no brainer. I’m really pleased that the sustainable benefits are being celebrated, but its recognised alongside the fact that we did this by improving the performance and by saving money. Last year, this project was recognised as one of the projects that made a real difference across the organisation.”

Jon qualified his reasons for championing remanufactured IT, stating that his experience has been “wholly positive”, as our remanufactured laptops have reduced their IT costs to the tune of more than £1 million. The great cost savings for the construction firm came without compromise as no performance concerns have been experienced, demonstrating reliability and a reduction in waste.

A higher spec, lighter, sustainable, and more affordable option has helped Balfour Beatty significantly on their road to achieve their sustainability goals; in line with the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development agenda and their own company commitment to sustainability.

CO2 prevented

1,800 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent greenhouse gases prevented at manufacture

CO2 sequestered

3,400 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent greenhouse gases sequestered from the atmosphere

Water saved

1.08 million cubic litres of water has been saved from the production of new materials

Reforestation

28,500 trees planted through our reforestation partners

“Whilst laptops might not seem the obvious choice to reduce materials for a company in our sector, most people won’t be aware that the manufacture of laptops uses vast amounts of water, require rare earth minerals that need to be mined, extracted, processed – and that whole manufacturing process requires a huge amount of energy and generates a lot of waste.”

“In our case, we are saving over 1,600 tonnes of CO2, 6000 tonnes of resources and a million cubic litres of water. Circular Computing also offset all of their omissions associated with the remanufacturing process. This amounts to approximately 28,500 trees for Balfour Beatty.”

BEKIR ANDREWS, Associate Director for Group Sustainability, Balfour Beatty

Quality without compromise

We produce leading brand, carbon neutral remanufactured laptops.

Our BSI Kitemark™ certified process remanufactures laptops ‘to equal or better than new’, with up to 40% cost savings compared to the latest models and an RMA of less than 3%.

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