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vans
Balfour Beatty is committed to ensuring nobody is harmed by its work and that means it needs the safest vehicles and safest drivers.
Words: Justin Stanton You can choose to differentiate your business
from your rivals in many ways, but it's uncommon in transport, outside of hazchem, to sell yourself on your safety record. However, that's exactly what Balfour Beatty is doing with its Zero Harm initiative and that approach determines the vehicles it procures.
CM is sat in a meeting room at Mercedes-Benz World at [kooklands. overlooking the test track: opposite us is Steve Farmer, MD of Balfour Beatty Plant and Fleet Services His division of the construction giant is responsible for procuring all types of vehicles for all Balfour businesses in the UK. Of interest to CMis the 3,000 LCVs and 1,000 HGVs that Farmer oversees.
Two years ago, Balfour chief executive lan Tyler set the entire group the Zero Harm target of achieving "zero deaths, zero injuries to the public and zero ruined lives among all our people" by 2012. The three key indicators for the initiative are: the number of fatalities, the number of permanently disabling injuries (preventing a person returning to their normal duties on a permanent basis), and the accident frequency rate (the number of reportable major and more than three-day accidents per 100,000 hours worked).
That's a tough target, especially in construction, an industry that has been on a concerted drive to improve its safety record for over a decade. Balfour has been at the forefront of that drive, hence the inception of Zero Harm.
Last year, Farmer's business issued a tender for LCVs for Balfour Beatty Utility Services (BBUS). Safety specification was a key criteria.Ultimately. Mercedes-Benz won the tender (CM4 February). supplying 700 Sprinters, mostly 3130'D1 Euro-5 3.5-tonne panel vans (supplied by Sheffield-based Northside Truck and Van). And the vans are specced to the gills with safety features (see box). Farmer explains: "Mercedes had always been a premium brand to us, which is why we'd not previously looked at Mercedes' veil ides. The new specs we were looking for last year, specifically the safety benefits. brought Mercedes to the fore. [Similar] safety systems are available on other brands, but on the Mercedes, they were standard which made the Mercedes very competitive on price.
"Equally importantly was Mercedes' willingness to meet us halfway; they weren't stand-offish, they genuinely wanted to work with us in terms of pulling the Zero Harm specification together."
He continues: -Where we started to see fresh air between Mercedes and the competition was on things like passengers airbags the layman might expect them to be common in commercial vehicles, but they're not. When as a company you take a stance on [safety'. you can't discriminate between the driver and the passenger to such an extent [thus the Sprinter having the passenger airbag standard was cruciall."
So. is it safety, no matter what the cost for Balfour'?"We turn that around." says Farmer. "It's costlier to have accidents, That's the way we look at it. It's very difficult when we're investing in technology to calculate the cost/ benefit analysis: all we know is we've given this Zero Harm commitment and that's exactly where we're going to be. Having taken that stance. failure is not an option."
Commercial reality always kicks in somewhere though., so the Sprinter's strong residual values certainly didn't impede its ability to win Farmer over.
There are already more than 100 Sprinters in service at BBUS, and according to Farmer, they are performing well. "The fact that it's got a three-pointed star on the bonnet says a lot about our commitment. We're telling our staff driving the vehicles that they deserve the best and that's been warmly received. It proves Zero Harm is not rhdoric." he says. •