Business Problem: Our client is a large regional construction company, specializing in large commercial and government projects. In the construction industry, workers' compensation claims are a significant cost and can make or break the profitability of a job. Because the claims were not being effectively tracked, the client could not produce useful metrics to measure the performance of individual jobs or entire divisions, nor could they properly account for costs, charging them back to the job on which the claim occurred.
Solution: We consulted with the client to determine what information they needed to track for each claim, then designed an application to fulfill the need. We integrated it with their existing account and job management software in order to take advantage of the wealth of information already available and to minimize the amount of data entry required. The application tracks:
- Each claim and the employee who filed it
- The insurance company’s claim number, if applicable
- The job on which the employee was working when the incident occurred
- All costs resulting from the claim
- All duty status changes (light duty or lost time)
In addition to tracking the information, the application has a number of reports that provide useful metrics, including:
- The cost per man hour for each job (a standard industry metric)
- Claims by division
- Claims by type
- Lost time and light duty reports
- Automatic generation of OSHA logs
Using these reports, the client has been able to improve their accounting and significantly reduce their overhead, saving over half a million dollars in the first year alone. In addition, they were able to use the information from the system to qualify to bid on two multimillion dollar jobs that would have previously been difficult to document safety statistics as required by the bid documents.
Technical Details: The application was built on Microsoft's .NET platform, using the C# programming language. The database is Microsoft SQL Server 2000, which was already deployed for other purposes. The reports were created with Crystal Reports. The application relies on Active Directory authentication for its own internal security and for database authentication. There are three levels of access: view-only, edit, and administer. Users can also be granted access to individual reports as needed. This allows the client to protect sensitive data.
