Beyond Fred Flintstone: vulcan adapts a browser-based system for on-site claims reporting and cuts costs by 40 percent.

Safety and workers' comp claims are a major concern for Vulcan Materials, a Birmingham, Alabama-based construction aggregates company. Many of the company's 8,000 employees work in stone quarries and sand and gravel plants with heavy machinery: massive haul trucks, loaders and processing equipment that crushes boulders into pebble-sized bits of stone.

As supervisor of corporate risk, Chilcoat was looking for a way to streamline and standardize workers' comp claims from the company's 166 stone quarries, 37 sand and gravel plants, 66 sales yards, 45 asphalt plants and 22 ready-mixed concrete facilities.

"We're self-insured and self-administered for workers' comp claims and liability claims," Chilcoat said. "What had been happening in the past is that our various divisions throughout the country would fill out a paper, either a workers' comp claim form or a liability claim form, and they would either fax it or mail it."

Those handwritten forms, however, were prone to errors, forcing Chilcoat's staff to spend much of their time simply double-checking information such as Social Security numbers or having to make follow-up calls to decipher someone's handwriting.

To tackle this problem, Vulcan adopted a browser-based claims management system from CSC to allow safety personnel from the company's divisions to electronically submit the information.

Chilcoat's department linked that to the employee database so that much of the required information, such as the employee's address, would be automatically filled in on the claims form when the employee's name was entered.

"It cut down tremendously on duplication; it cut down on errors being entered, and it streamlined the whole process, so that our people in this department who were having to key in the data were freed up to do higher-level tasks related to that claim," Chilcoat said. "They have more time to really be focused on the claim itself, and get more details and ask more questions and spend more time managing the claim, rather than having to sit at their desk entering claim information."

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Then, working with the corporate safety, health and environmental department, Vulcan decided to expand the type of information collected on the reports in order to better track injury trends and so prevent future injuries.

"Already for workers' comp purposes, we were reporting whether (the injury) was a hand or an arm, but we took it to another level with their help to say the right hand was injured in this piece of equipment and this is what the person was doing when they were using this equipment," Chilcoat said. That additional information allowed the safety staff to analyze the data for trends across the company, such as, Were certain injuries more likely on certain pieces of equipment being used in a certain way?

"They were able to develop better safety procedures when they found such a trend," she said. That trend analysis, added in with other measures the company was taking, helped Vulcan to improve its safety rate.

"Within a five-year period we reduced our workers' comp claims by about 40 percent," Chilcoat said. "Not only is the information more accurate, but we also reduced the number of claims because we allowed our safety people to see reports and information that they had not been able to see in such detail before. It was a joint effort between our department and our Safety, Health and Environmental Department."

As a bonus, the new process allowed Vulcan to demonstrate to its underwriters in a very detailed manner that it is carefully and effectively managing the risks associated with mining and obtain more favorable premiums.