Wawa Centralizes Incident Reporting across 560 Retail Stores with CSC’s RISKMASTER

Since the days of milkmen, Wawa Inc. has been a household name as a processor and distributor of milk, juices and tea. Over the past century, Wawa has expanded from a milk plant in Wawa, Pennsylvania, to more than 568 convenience stores in five U.S. states. From the beverage center to the gas pump, Wawa must manage approximately 4,000 incidents a year, from cuts and falls to robberies, less than half of which become claims. Wawa uses a third-party administrator (TPA) to process claims, but the company’s paper-based infrastructure for reporting incidents had become increasingly inefficient.

Extensive Evaluation Process

The company underwent an extended enterprise-wide review of its risk and claims program. Wawa worked with a broker-consultant and reviewed numerous claims and RMIS software products and hosted in-house demonstrations by the vendors.

Wawa chose CSC’s RISKMASTER solution to centralize incident/claims and risk information in what Stephanie Capaccio, Wawa’s director of Benefits and Risk Management, described as the “database of record.”

The project included moving 15 years of data from the two TPA-based claim systems in addition to the company’s HR system into RISKMASTER. After about 10 months of development, Wawa went into production with the new system in September 2006.

“One of the things at the top of our list was our ability to do great reporting,” Capaccio said. “When we saw the Business Intelligence component of RISKMASTER, we were very impressed with the drag and drop feature and how easy it could be for us to deliver reports to our constituents, as well as allow people to become self sufficient in the future to run their own reports."

Reengineering the Process

In addition to replacing the old system, Wawa focused on completely reengineering its incident reporting process to eliminate duplicate entry. Under the new system, store personnel simply place a telephone call to Wawa’s internal call center to provide predefined information that eases the effort to initially report the incident. It only takes five minutes for call center staff to gather the information and enter it into the system. CSC worked with Wawa to develop a Web-based form that guides employees through the process.

“Our team is able to review the incident and quickly determine what needs to be reported to the TPA, and they can make these real-time decisions without having to be data-entry clerks,” Capaccio said.

Positioned for the Future

For the first time in the company’s history, Wawa has a system that can aggregate risk management information across the enterprise including safety, security, quality control and environmental management.

“We didn’t buy RISKMASTER so we could do all of this tomorrow,” Capaccio said. “Our plan is to do this systematically, so we can continue to make the most out of the systems we now have.”

Further, the company is in a better position to self adjudicate more of its own claims, reducing its reliance on its third-party administrator and reducing overall claims costs.

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