Turner Construction Company, the U.S. subsidiary of construction group Hochtief, is one of the world’s leading general builders, ranking first or second in major segments of the construction industry. The company provides construction and project management services for commercial and multifamily buildings, airports and stadiums, as well as correctional, entertainment, healthcare and manufacturing facilities. Turner employs more than 5,000 people who work on more than 1,500 projects each year that involve 100,000 subcontractors on its construction sites each day.

Risk management is a critical focus for the company, and more than 300 Turner employees are directly involved in risk management efforts. Turner Casualty and Surety, the company’s risk management arm, consists of 40 employees who are dedicated to claims, safety, finance, insurance and information technology.

David Lawton is the director of information technology at Turner. He uses Aon RiskConsole to help the company achieve its risk data strategy objectives. According to Lawton, while defect claims make headlines in construction-related stories, the primary focus for Turner is safety.

“We wanted to establish procedures to create the safest work environment possible,” Lawton says. “This meant we had to determine the root causes of accidents. Having access to relevant data is a powerful way to convince people there is a problem when they don’t believe a problem exists.”

In mid-2004, Lawton and his team began selecting a new risk management information system (RMIS). At the time, Turner was using two systems: one focused on claims data consolidation and the other on premium allocation. “A lot of data was loaded into one of these two systems and it was a challenge to maintain information on locations, projects and subcontractors in both of them,” Lawton says. “The lack of data integration limited our data analysis or, at best, created a cumbersome system. Disconnected information was a problem for us.”

The objective became to consolidate claims, exposures, policies, rates and other risk-related data into one system. After seven months of work that involved a 400-page request for proposal and a review of 20 vendors, Turner selected Aon RiskConsole.

Integrating Turner Construction Critical Data to RiskConsole

Information flows continually to Turner’s 42 business units; this information includes 12 data feeds, of which five are internal, and a distribution of reports detailing premium allocations, audits, adjustments, loss triangles, benchmarking, loss runs, subcontractor loss analysis and incident logs. Turner now uses RiskConsole for finance, premium allocation and claims analysis across the company’s business units.

“With a large number of subcontractors working on our sites daily, it’s critical that we have an understanding of who is physically on the sites and who is involved in each project,” Lawton says. “Many of our subcontractors work on multiple projects at the same time, so we configured Aon's RiskConsole to create a location code that identifies the project and subcontractor—we supply this information to a third-party claims administrator. As a result, we can actually tie losses to the subcontractor across multiple projects. We also take advantage of RiskConsole’s report-scheduling ability to e-mail reports that track new claims, closures, re-open activity, as well as reserve changes over $25,000 to the business unit claims coordinators and safety personnel.”

Insurance claims coordinators use Aon's RiskConsole to gain access to information when they need it, without having to wait for the risk management team to issue a report. “They can just click on the report and there it is,” Lawton says. “If they need further information or something catches their eye, they can drill down to the details. The reaction from the claims coordinators has been unbelievable once they understood that with a few mouse clicks they were able to go into the system and pull custom reports, and with a few more they could get a meaningful graph or chart for their general manager.”