BB&T Bank

BB&T Corporation, the 14th largest financial holding company in the US, expanded rapidly since the late 1980s by acquiring 60 community banks and thrifts, more than 85 insurance agencies, and 35 non-bank financial services companies. A financially sound institution, BB&T operates retail banks in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S. The company also has a large insurance brokerage operation and owns an array of specialized non-bank financial service companies across the U.S. and Canada.

Real Estate
The company’s Support Services Division grew rapidly to keep up with the responsibility of managing all real estate properties. The company’s banking network operates 1500 retail branches ranging in size from 1,000 to 20,000 square feet, with an average size of 5,000 square feet. Data centers, operations, processing, and back-office functions occupy 70 “corporate” buildings with a total of 3 million square feet. When you include BB&T’s non-bank businesses, the company occupies nearly 2500 locations totaling more than 13.5 million square feet.

Facility Management
Over the last several years, BB&T increased its focus on organic growth as a viable way to grow its core banking business. In 2006 and 2007, the company constructed 71 De Novo banking locations and acquired new sites to accommodate future growth. In the backoffice, intense focus on efficiency was creating increased amounts of vacant space. At the same time, regulatory changes and the expansion of online initiatives fueled demand for office space in new markets.

The company realized that it needed a solution that would help track all of the acquisition activities and also allow it to utilize back-office space more efficiently. The company set a conservative goal to reduce occupancy expenses by $500,000 annually over the first few years with the new system.

As the organization grew, facility management became increasingly complex. Methodologies and data sources had become increasingly fragmented into silos; BB&T needed to consolidate information to become proactive in managing physical assets. After an intensive evaluation of Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS), they chose Planon as the solution that best met their requirements.

BB&T was in the process of centralizing maintenance, janitorial, and landscaping services in their banking network. Partnering with an outside service company led to the consolidation of vendors and many changes for internal employees. In order to help measure service levels, the leading vendor offered their own proprietary system and personnel for managing work orders. This would have forced BB&T to introduce an additional help desk for bank employees. It also meant that the company was dependent on the vendor for performance reporting. BB&T needed a way to manage its own information on maintenance history and service levels.

Lecagy Systems
Prior to implementing Planon, BB&T’s Support Services Division used a number of Access databases and Excel spreadsheets to track information. The result was a massive duplication of effort to keep simple property data up-to-date across various systems. The company utilized an externally-hosted real estate management system, but this solution was not updated with internal data and had no interaction with the Accounts Payable department. BB&T had also customized a third-party procurement tool to manage maintenance work orders. This system was not equipped to handle future growth and became difficult to support due to BB&T’s customization of the product.

Implementation of the IT project
In the summer of 2007, BB&T implemented its first phase of the Planon Enterprise Edition for all processes related to facilities projects, planned, and reactive maintenance. This made it possible for all employees of the bank to submit service requests, report maintenance issues, and order products via the web based Employee Self Service Portal (ESS) integrated with BB&T’s existing intranet. Employees can check the status of their requests and orders at any time and interact with Support Services directly through the Portal. Orders are routed directly to external service providers and can be managed in the
vendor’s own back office system via an interface to the Planon database. The interface allows vendors to follow-up on calls, request additional information, provide quotes and estimates, and ultimately complete their work orders and initiate the invoicing process. The BB&T Support Services staff can easily obtain the status on any outstanding orders and measure vendor performance ensuring compliance to service level agreements.

The next phase included the Integration of Planon Mobile. Using Planon Mobile Solutions, maintenance staff and technicians can receive and update the status of work orders, enter working hours, costs, and parts used during reactive and planned maintenance activities. Once BB&T completed their implementation they immediately recognized the benefits of an integrated approach:

• Over 28,000 BB&T employees have access to the Employee Self Service Portal and have the ability to place service calls or order assets through the intranet.
• Over 300 BB&T staff work with the ProCenter Java client. Employees at 40 external vendors are also working with the system via the externally over the intranet.
• Over 120,000 facilities and reactive maintenance orders and over 27,000 preventive maintenance orders are created in the system every quarter.
• Planon’s Lease Administration is managing over 1,500 locations.
• Approximately 40 million dollars in invoices will be processed on a yearly basis on reactive maintenance alone. This figure reachs several hundred million dollars with the inclusion of Project and Transaction Management for managing Construction Projects.

Results
Planon replaced both of the work order systems used by BB&T and their leading service provider. Through use of Planon’s Employee Self Service module, BB&T was able to consolidate two help desks into one and realize efficiency savings that nearly tripled the company’s internal goal. Additionally, BB&T now has capability to report on Service Levels and Maintenance History unlike ever before. For Real Estate, BB&T piloted Planon’s Space Management tool by loading CAD drawings for approximately 3 million square feet of corporate office space. In the pilot space study that was enabled by the Planon tool, BB&T discovered a vacancy rate of over 20% in a key corporate market. The amount of vacant space exceeded the estimates of BB&T’s space planning team. Accurate occupancy information will allow the company to strategize future growth plans to mprove utilization of existing assets, which could potentially result in millions of dollars worth of cost avoidance. Due to the early success, BB&T plans to expand the use of the Space Management tool in 2009 to include an additional 11 million square feet of retail bank and other office space.