Tue, July 15, 2003 — CIO — 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.