Pacific Gas & Electric Co. Powers up Claims and Collections with CSC’s RISKMASTER

Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), one of the largest combination of natural gas and electric utilities in the United States, manages a wide range of claims — from power outages to car crashes with utility poles. Beginning in 1994, the San Francisco-based utility began storing its incident and claims data on a homegrown system that could only be accessed through a COBOL language development tool. The tool was no longer supported by the manufacturer, and to make matters worse, it was installed on an aging PC.

Greater Flexibility in Tracking Outages and Other Incidents

While PG&E’s Third Party Claims personnel built the case for upgrading the company’s system to newer technology, they met with a wide range of risk management information system providers, including CSC.

"We saw most of the major systems out there, and we explored building our own system, but we decided RISKMASTER gave us most of what we wanted at the most reasonable cost," said Shawn Mallan, PG&E’s senior program manager of Third Party Claims. "RISKMASTER was truly at a higher level in the area of event tracking, which was very important to us. Most claims handling systems won’t let you report an incident, such as a power outage, without creating a claim.

RISKMASTER is much more flexible. We have thousands of outages to track each year. By capturing outages in the system when they happen, you’ve got as much documentation as possible available when a claim comes down the road sometime later."

Most customer service calls about outages and other incidents are routed through PG&E’s interactive voice response (IVR) system. CSC helped PG&E interface its power outage tracking system with RISKMASTER, which automatically creates a new event for each new outage.

Ease of Integration with Financial System

RISKMASTER also interfaces with PG&E’s SAP financial system, allowing risk management personnel to electronically submit damage claims to the accounting department. The SAP system handles billing to third parties to reimburse PG&E for damage to company property, while the interface with RISKMASTER allows claims personnel to track the payment status of all billable claims.

"We’ve really been able to take advantage of RISKMASTER’s ease of integration with other systems," Mallan said. "It’s allowing us to move toward a more paperless process."

Web-Based Support for up to 800 Users

Nearly 800 PG&E employees throughout that service area must be able to enter events into the system. PG&E licensed the system for 65 users, but CSC worked with the company to create a custom Web page that allows other employees to submit new events electronically.

As a result, RISKMASTER has allowed PG&E to improve its auditing and tracking capabilities and automate collections for most damage claims, Mallan said.

"RISKMASTER gave us a lot more flexibility," Mallan added. "Other systems we saw were limited in terms of the growth, and the ability to add new fields. A lot of the other vendors we talked with were smaller companies that were relatively new. We know CSC has been around for a long time. We’ve received good support, and we know CSC is going to be around for the long haul."

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