Assistant Benchmarking Estimator

About the role

Balfour Beatty is a leading international infrastructure group, delivering complex construction and engineering projects that shape how people live, work and travel. With a strong heritage and a reputation for quality, safety and innovation, we operate across the UK, US and Hong Kong, working on major projects in transport, energy, defence and urban development. Balfour Beatty is committed to creating sustainable solutions and leaving lasting positive impacts in the communities it serves, making it an exciting place to build a rewarding career.

We are now seeking an Assistant Benchmarking Estimator to join our team.

The need to capture and utilise robust and real data from our projects, and to use this data as benchmarking support, has been identified as a key tool in managing our pre-construction and delivery outcomes, and in supporting our customers and partners in the development of proposals and the management of change.

The role is to carry out benchmarking on major complex infrastructure projects across the transportation and energy sectors including:

• Collection and aggregation of cost, time and carbon data from projects in preconstruction and delivery to produce consistent, comparable and meaningful benchmarking data
• Work collaboratively with preconstruction and delivery teams to set up and maintain cost, time and carbon data on projects to facilitate benchmarking data collection in the most efficient way

Core activities:

• Collation of cost and production data from projects, working with and re-processing raw data where necessary to generate accurate benchmarks that are consistent with the benchmarking structure.
• Checking and validating the benchmarks generated
• Capturing and recording engineering data for all assets benchmarked
• Capturing data on templates and preparing and finalising them in a consistent and structured way to enable upload to the system
• Support the development of more automated data collection processes by working collaboratively with relevant teams to identify solutions to improve data structuring and processing, to facilitate more frequent benchmarking cycles
• Support preconstruction and delivery teams to incorporate benchmark coding in estimates, forecasts, finance and planning systems to enable systematic and periodic harvesting of benchmarking data
• The role will require travel to various project locations to meet teams and work together to collate data, although this is not envisaged to be regular travel

Supporting activities:

• Support preconstruction and project teams in their use of the benchmarking system, and gather feedback and ideas for improvements
• Support preconstruction and delivery teams by providing relevant comparable benchmarks from the system to support their activity

Deliverables & Controls:

• Benchmarking is an essential part of governance, supporting decision-making at bid and preconstruction stages – support preconstruction and project delivery teams to achieve this by providing consistent and accurate data records
• Timely, accurate and useful input to estimating, commercial and optioneering support, by request
• Continual improvement of benchmarking processes and systems through learning and experience; providing recommendations for improvements

The following qualities and experience are essential:

• Demonstrable industry experience in a technical role (engineering / estimating) on major infrastructure / civil engineering projects, with an understanding of construction methods, processes and temporary works
• Experience of either bid, preconstruction or construction delivery phases of projects incorporating major, complex civil engineering
• Good interpersonal skills that enable working relationships to be developed at all levels across the business
• Good planning, management and organisation skills
• Demonstrable verbal and written communication skills
• Demonstrable analytical and problem‑solving skills
• Team player who is highly committed to achieving results in a collaborative way with others
• Ability to demonstrate passion, commitment and enthusiasm towards common team goals and sharing in successes

Day in, day out,…