FUNCTIONAL FOCUS
KBR’s functional teams keep our business moving. That’s why we’re proud to showcase their work, recent wins, improvements and new initiatives, and to highlight how their success benefits all of us.
This quarter, we’re excited to feature a guest contributor, KBR technology expert Dr. Ben Ochoa, who explains just a few of the many ways KBR is using digital technology to streamline operations and processes across its functional business.
A Faster, More Efficient Business
Digital technologies are changing how business gets done. It’s certainly evident in the solutions we are delivering for our customers. Today, delivering quickly and with excellence is paramount. KBR Digital Accelerators are helping drive speed to market, generating strategic and cost advantages, reducing risk, and increasing operational agility.
We’re already starting to see AI and machine learning (ML) helping our people be more efficient. Early adopters are already to the point where I refer to them as “10x engineers” because they’re already 10 times more productive. Now imagine the digital systems we are building for our customers, enabling them to be 10 times more efficient. If you are a software engineer at KBR, AI can help write code faster and improve the way you’re designing the code you are developing. Similarly, hardware engineers can design chips more efficiently. Before large language models (LLMs) were even common, AI/ML were helping design chips humans would never have thought of. With LLMs, we’re seeing even more interesting designs.
We have been integrating digital technologies at the front end of projects and standardizing our processes so that all these factors work together and have a compounding effect to accelerate what we do for our customers.
So what does it look like for KBR’s functional businesses? Everything I mentioned has to apply internally as well. Just like our multiyear customer projects, our internal processes are multiyear and must run with the same kind of efficiency. Here are just a few examples of how we’re deploying technology to make KBR a more agile, more efficient business.
Legal
For a global company like KBR, fielding legal questions is a never-ending task. We have people in roughly 30 countries around the world. There are countless policies and procedures depending on what country you’re in.
We’re using digital technology to answer employees’ specific questions based on their online persona, which will save our Legal department valuable time.
People and Procurement
The “war for talent” rolls ever on. When you do work that matters all over the world, like KBR, that means you’re always on the lookout for the best and brightest to fill specific strategic positions.
Our People function is using digital technology to automatically generate employment descriptions based on specific requisition requirements.
Our Procurement teams are using similar technology to produce price reasonableness determinations, essentially justifications for pricing and also terms and conditions. Similar to the Legal team, digital agents are able to automatically generate the hiring or pricing documentation needed quickly. Then this efficiency compounds with, for example, the work other teams are doing. The digital agent can automatically compare vendor terms and conditions with KBR’s, send the information directly to Legal for review, and then ship it to Finance professionals who will run it all through a revenue recognition evaluation tool.
More on the Horizon
These are just a few examples of the ways we’re using digital technology to make KBR a better company. While some are at different points in their rollout, we are being diligent about integrating internal digital tools so that they will work in synergy with the solutions we’re developing for our customers. At the end of the day, it’s about harnessing the power of data and shortening the distance to decision-making.
Stay tuned for future updates on our digitalization journey.
