How Halo is helping Birmingham City University save 25-30 hours a week

33,000

Protected every day

1300+

Hours Saved

28

Buildings

7

Sites

Introduction

Birmingham City University (BCU) is one of the UK’s most dynamic and diverse higher education institutions, operating across a 28-building, 7-site estate. With thousands of students and staff on campus every day, BCU’s security and facilities teams needed a modern solution to unify reporting across teams, improve visibility of trends and hotspots, and enable smarter, data-driven decisions.

The Challenge

BCU’s security and operations teams found numerous problems and challenges in paper-based processes, siloed communication channels, and extremely time-consuming daily, weekly & monthly reporting with information spread across many static documents and sources.

They needed a solution that would help them combat and optimise:

Manual data entry and university incident reporting
Limited visibility across multiple campuses
Reactive decision-making based on anecdotal evidence
Difficulty producing consistent, auditable reports

The Solution

Giving Precious Time Back – Halo has reduced daily report writing time by 25-30 hours per week, saving £35,000+ of staff hours which can be diverted elsewhere, and boosting staff autonomy and efficiency.

Instant Insights – Real-time analytics from HaloInsights enable smarter, data-driven decisions on resourcing and operational priorities across BCU’s 28-building, 7-site estate.

Meaningful Business Cases – The insights gained from Halo help quantify operational challenges, making it easier to secure thousands of pounds of funding and justify investments to stakeholders.

Previously, using a paperwork to document system, data mining was very challenging. Now, Halo helps us to use the real-time statistics we have to easily make decisions around resourcing and other business needs across our 28 building, 7 site estate. We did some analysis, and we found we’re saving hundreds of hours – between 25 and 30 hours a week – on daily report writing, thanks to implementing Halo.

– Mark McCrory, Head of Security Operations