Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Bechtel uses wireless tech to gain a competitive edge

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 22:49:37 -0400

CASE STUDY EARLY ADOPTER
Building on Air
Bechtel uses wireless tech to gain a competitive edge
BY MERIDITH LEVINSON

BECHTEL GROUP—the $11.6 billion, 47,000-employee engineering and construction
company best known for building the $14.7 billion English Channel Tunnel and the
$20 billion Jubail Industrial City in Saudi Arabia, and most recently for
receiving a $34.6 million contract to rebuild Iraq's war-crippled
infrastructure—was experiencing a precipitous decline in new contracts in 2001.
The value of new work had plummeted from a high of $23 billion in 1999 to $14.5
billion in 2000 and to $9.3 billion in 2001. The weakening of the U.S. economy and
the reputation Bechtel earned in Massachusetts over its alleged mismanagement of
the $14 billion-plus Central Artery Tunnel Project (a.k.a. the Big Dig) seemingly
had combined to hurt the giant's financial performance.
Looking for a way to increase efficiency—and hopefully improve sales—in October
2001, Bechtel Enterprises, the finance, development and investment wing of Bechtel
Group, rolled out a wireless infrastructure and 35 handheld computers from
venture-backed startup Good Technology. Alberto Hernandez, Bechtel Enterprises'
information systems manager, thought the wireless technology would let his
division's mobile professionals, who are responsible for striking deals with
potential customers, close more contracts and thus improve Bechtel's overall
financial state. Thirty-five handhelds may seem like small potatoes for such a
huge company, but when each person working with one of those wireless PDAs is in
charge of inking a multimillion dollar deal, a technology's impact can add up
fast.
"In today's market, the person who's got the most information is able to win the
most work," Hernandez says. "When you're out there trying to make a deal, there's
a lot of info that could give us an advantage over a potential competitor."
The PDAs and wireless infrastructure have certainly made accessing time-sensitive
information and mission-critical applications much easier for Bechtel Enterprises'
deal makers. They can now much more easily tap in to the company's proprietary
personnel database, ExpertLink, to identify individuals with particular expertise
(such as fluency in Arabic or experience constructing airports) when putting
together a business plan for a potential client. The mobile workers can also more
quickly find out which prospective customers their colleagues are meeting by
wirelessly searching a proprietary market intelligence application called BDTools.
In addition, they no longer need to struggle with unstable dial-up connections to
submit time sheets.
Jack Gold, an analyst with Meta Group, says ROIs for wireless deployments will
vary, but there are "three primary benefits companies should seek." One is
increased productivity of users. Another is more efficiently run operations. The
final one is "better overall customer intimacy," he says. And according to
Hernandez, Bechtel Enterprises has scored two of the three—increased productivity
and more efficiently run operations.

No More Waiting
Before Bechtel Enterprises began deploying wireless technology, mobile workers
didn't have easy access to corporate information. If, for example, a Bechtel
Enterprises employee in Asia was trying to put together a deal with a potential
customer in that region to build an airport and wanted to show the client all the
expertise the organization had in building airports, he would have to ask an HR
person in Bechtel's San Francisco headquarters to search the company's ExpertLink
database for a list of qualified individuals. The employee in Asia would have to
wait at least a day to get the information because of the time difference and the
lack of connectivity. Today, the remote Bechtel rep can get that information
instantly on his PDA.
Submitting time sheets pertaining to work on U.S. government contracts was also a
problem before Hernandez brought in wireless. Government regulations require the
company to fill out sheets on a daily basis. Each time an employee fails to submit
one on time, whether due to an unstable dial-up connection or the inability to
locate a computer with dial-up access, Bechtel incurs a "substantial" penalty.
(Hernandez won't elaborate on the actual figure.) These days, Bechtel Enterprises'
mobile sales force no longer has to worry about temperamental modems preventing
them from submitting their time sheets on time. They can access the time record
application and submit their time sheets through wireless handhelds.
To access their Microsoft Outlook e-mail, calendar or contact information,
employees had to find a location with a computer (if they didn't have one of their
own) and either a LAN connection or the capability to access the corporate network
via a remote access server (RAS). "You've got a person sitting at a terminal
waiting for, one, a connection, and two, for the data to come back to them via an
analog line, which is pretty slow," says Hernandez.
While all that waiting seems like it would be enough to make any user scream to
their IS department for better IT, Hernandez insists he wasn't getting complaints
from users about the difficulty of making those remote connections. "I think we
were being proactive," he says.

Drop the Cradle
At the time Bechtel Enterprises decided to give wireless a whirl in 2001, 35 of
its 250 employees were already using BlackBerry pagers from Research In Motion
(RIM). But even with the BlackBerrys, users didn't have instant access to the
information they needed. Syncing the data on a handheld with the data stored in
back-end corporate databases required a trip to the user's desktop cradle, which
was likely back in a hotel room or the home office. After he was approached by
sales executives from Good Technology, Hernandez became sold on the basis of the
company's cradleless, wireless synchronization technology, the capability to
wirelessly enable proprietary corporate applications so that users could access
them from either their RIM or Good devices, and the fact that Good's software will
eventually run on other devices, such as Palms, Handsprings, Compaq iPAQs and
Microsoft smart phones.
In addition to purchasing 35 new Good devices, which brought the total number of
wireless handhelds deployed in the organization to 70, Bechtel loaded Good's
GoodLink and GoodInfo software onto two different servers. The GoodLink software
lets handhelds communicate with the company's Microsoft Exchange server. GoodLink
takes all the e-mail, contact and calendar information in Exchange, converts it to
a format suitable for a RIM or Good device, encrypts it using Verisign's triple
DES (data encryption standard; a popular symmetric-key encryption method) and
pushes it outside the Bechtel firewall and over Cingular Wireless's Mobitext
network.
Meanwhile, GoodInfo performs database queries on a variety of back-end systems,
including proprietary databases, an ERP system, and a Salesforce.com or Siebel CRM
system. For example, if a user wants to find out if any of his colleagues are
meeting with ExxonMobil or if he needs information on tax policies, contracts with
banks or experiences with lenders, GoodInfo connects to the necessary data sources
and returns the results to the user via wireless e-mail within minutes.
Hernandez says it took just three hours to get the GoodLink server up and running
and about five hours to both put the GoodInfo server online and wirelessly enable
three corporate applications—ExpertLink (the resource management application),
BDTools (the market intelligence application) and BETR (Bechtel Enterprises' time
recording application). (Hernandez admits that the deployment was so quick partly
because the applications were already Web-enabled. Had he needed to put a
browser-interface on those apps, the implementation would have taken much longer.)

Hernandez won't disclose the cost of the hardware, software and wireless service
he purchased from Good, noting only that he spent $10,000 in consulting fees. But
a company that buys low-end server software from Good and rolls out 70 devices can
expect to make an initial investment of less than $20,000 (based on the $349 cost
of each handheld device and the GoodLink server that starts at $2,000) plus $35
per user per month for a basic wireless service package and other fees, according
to Good.
Hernandez, who is participating in an early-adopters program with Good, is
currently in the process of deciding, with users' input, which other corporate
applications should next be made available via the wireless network. He wants to
roll out more devices to the 250 employees who work for Bechtel Enterprises. In
fact, he says, if he gets his way, everyone in the organization will have one.

The Benefits
In 2002, Bechtel Group managed to increase the amount of new business it booked
from $9.3 billion in 2001 to $12.7 billion in 2002 for a net increase of $3.4
billion. Hernandez won't credit any of that increase to wireless technology. He
will, however, point to cost savings. By deploying Good's technology, Hernandez
was able to disconnect the RAS server, saving his company about $30,000 a month on
remote connectivity. He says the difference between what he was paying for the RAS
server and what he's paying for Good is about $25,000 a month.
In spite of Bechtel's dramatic cost savings, this kind of wireless deployment
won't work for every company. Stephen Drake, an analyst with research company IDC
(a sister company to CIO's publisher, CXO Media), advises companies to think
critically about which applications they want to make available over a wireless
network and who's going to use them. Bechtel Enterprises made three
mission-critical applications available to its mobile sales force. Good made sense
for Bechtel Enterprises because the organization uses the devices to obtain basic,
textual data that's easy to format for a small screen and that doesn't take a long
time to download over the slow Mobitext network (which is one-tenth the speed of a
phone dial-up connection). If Bechtel Enterprises employees were downloading
graphic-intensive maps or diagrams, they'd want to reconsider using both handheld
devices and a slow network.  And if the organization's users were not salespeople
on-the-go but construction workers spending their days underground, they'd
probably opt against a pure wireless connection, which would be impossible to
access from their subterranean locale, in favor of a cradle solution or some
combination of the two.
But for Bechtel's purposes, the Good products have proven...good. "It's critical
for our people to be able to access information. We're a global organization. For
them to be able to retrieve information without having somebody here in the office
get it for them is a big deal for us," says Hernandez.

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