Driving Better Incident and Claims Management with Data, Technology & Strategic Collaboration

Welcome to today’s RIMS webinar sponsored by Origami Risk, Driving Better Incident and Claims Management with Data, Dechnology, and Strategic Collaboration. I’m Jennifer Post, editor at Risk Management Magazine, published here at RIMS, the risk man the Risk and Insurance Management Society. I do have a few notes before we get started. If you have a question for the presenters during today’s session, please submit them by writing in the question box any point during the presentation. We will answer as many as we can during the Q and A portion at the end. And for those we cannot address, the origami risk team will reply to you directly. Following this session, the recording will be available on the on demand events page of rims dot org. All downloads and contact information will be accessible to the sponsor. RIMS is also thrilled to have Origami Risk be a gold sponsor at the RIMS conference 2025 in Seattle, Washington on November 17th and 18th. The registration page is available through the events page of rims dot org. And now on with today’s presentation. For nearly all organizations, success in claims management depends on more than just handling losses efficiently. It’s about connecting data, technology, and safety insights to prevent incidents, reduce claims severity, and strengthen overall risk posture. Today, Origami Risk will be joined by Eric Lobser of Spire Inc. and Tim Heinze of AEGIS Insurance Services Inc. Eric will share how Spire has transformed their incident reporting and claims process through integrated tools, analytics, and strong collaboration with internal teams and external partners like Aegis. Rooms is also thrilled to welcome a wonderful global audience. Now I will hand it off to Origami Risks senior EHS sales executive, Jeff Enzinger. Great. Thanks, Jennifer, so much. Yeah. So we’re looking forward to today’s conversation. Let’s move ahead in the slides here. Alright. So, Eric, would you mind giving us a little background and then Tim, and then I’ll follow-up? Sure. Yeah. Hi. I’m, Eric Lobser. I’m the vice president of enterprise risk at Spire. I’ve been in that role for about, seven years. Before that, I was in, regulatory, government affairs. Also, worked in strategy and business planning. And so, been with the company for about thirty five years. Great. Thanks. Tim? Excellent. Yeah. Thank you. Tim Heinze. I’m the chief loss control officer at Aegis Insurance Services. I’ve been with AEGIS for about six years, and I’ve been in, different insurance companies over the past 25 years, involved in loss control. And before that, I was twelve years in the army. So thank thank you for having me today. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Absolutely. And, my name is Jeff, and you I have a z in my name as well, so a lot of difficult names on the screen, but they all are phonetic. Jeff Enzinger. I’ve been with Origami for almost ten years. That picture is pretty old as you can tell. I’ve been in, risk management ever since two thousand, so twenty five years in the industry. And currently, my focus is environmental health and safety, which as we all know, is very closely intertwined with risk management and insurance, but have a lot of experience with Remus and claims as well. Alright. So really just kind of setting up what what Eric and Tim are mostly carrying the burden for today in terms of their discussion is, you know, how you take really smart people, how you have really thought out, well driven processes in terms of losses and how you handle them, and also how you work inside of an empowering technology to streamline a lot of that, a lot of that good, thought leadership into actionable and and practical results. And so we’re gonna be talking a a few things just before we get started, talking a little bit about who Spire is and who Aegis is, in case you don’t know. Yeah. We’re gonna dig into, you know, really, what is the incident and really prior to incidents, what does that whole scenario look like, and then how does it involve safety? Eric’s gonna get into a little bit more about, you know, just exactly how he’s improved, his claims and risk management handling processes. Certainly, in partnership with Tim at Aegis, the collaboration they have with ex you know, the collaboration Eric has with external partners. And then Eric does, you know, have a bit of captive and risk financing, information to share here as well as well. And then we’re gonna talk about just in generally recap what we’re talking about here and and, be glad to handle any questions that come up. Alright. So, Eric, let’s get started with you telling us a little bit more about Spire, and then we’ll hop over to Tim. Sure. Thanks, Joe. So for those of you not familiar with Spire, we’re we’re a gas company, that we have, about five utilities, mainly in Missouri, Alabama, and then also in Mississippi. We also do, some midstream work with our underground storage, in Wyoming and Oklahoma, and then have two, interstate pipelines that are in Missouri and Illinois. In addition to that, we do some marketing, throughout the US, sort of moving gas from region to region, mainly with wholesale companies, other marketers, utilities, power generators, things like that. And, you know, one of the things that wanted to convey to folks in terms of our risk profile, we have about thirty five hundred, employees and about twenty seven hundred vehicles. And more importantly, we we deliver a flammable product to our customers. And because of that, there’s a fair amount of federal oversight, at the Department of Transportation, Department of Energy. And then we also have oversight at each of our states from our public service commissions who all have safety staffs in addition to local codes and requirements. Related to that, the natural gas utility industry spends about thirty seven billion dollars a year on safety and reliability, and Spire accounts for about half a billion of that in terms of our CapEx in addition to what we do for operating expenditures for, you know, corrosion and leak surveys, right away surveys, pipeline locates, things like that. But, you know, one of the things that we reinforce, because we know it’s, you know, working with people, we do this all in conjunction and collaboration with one another, is a culture of safety, that goes beyond our employees to what we expect of our vendors. And we’ve adopted, a best practice from, the API related to eleven seventy three that was related to pipeline safety management, but really, took the p off of there and made it safety management systems, that, you know, we apply throughout the the company, the plan, do, check, act, cycle. It’s very similar to, you know, what we look at for enterprise risk management. Organizationally, I report up through the, chief, legal officer, and have, also our our claims and work comp, area reports up through there. But a lot of the risk management is done operationally in our shared services functions. We’ve got about fifteen different departments that are, pretty much focused on safety throughout the organization. Great. Thank you. Tim, tell us a little bit about Aegis. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks, Jeff. You know, we are a utility owned mutual insert, insurance company, founded back in nineteen seventy five. So this is our fiftieth year anniversary. Really founded by, you know, some gas companies actually that were finding issues, finding liability insurance in the commercial market. So they came together, really informed, what is Aegis today. It really is that committee of risk managers from those companies that got together to write that first policy. So, since then, we’ve really built out a a suite of product and services for our members. So we offer a wide range of utility, products for our members. And, again, you know, utility and the power industry is all we focus on, so all of those products and services are really focused on, what our members need and we develop those through feedback mechanisms, with our members. So there’s about three hundred policyholders today, and we do cover, the entire infrastructure, in North America, work real closely with companies like SPIRE, and specifically in my area, in loss control, we have about sixty five folks in the loss control division, I have a team that focuses on property loss control services, and then another on liability loss control services, so we work very closely with our with our members. Really, our goal is to be an extension of their team, really, you know, drive that safety culture as as Eric was talking about, and just really be an extension of their team. And overall at Aegis here, our goal is just to be a consistent and stable provider of, both capacity for insurance as well as services to help move the industry forward. Again, whether that’s at a individual utility, or whether that’s taking the information back from what we’re seeing across the country, aggregating that information, and and feeding out, common trends and emerging issues to our members. Great. Thank you for that. Alright. So, you know, let’s talk a little bit, Eric and Tim, specifically starting with Eric. You’ve described the risk profile, certainly a hazardous product you’re delivering to customers, lots of regulatory oversight, lots of different jurisdictions. But in general, how are you handling incident reporting, and how does that kinda play into safety for you? Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. It’s it’s, you know, key element from, you know, going from, you know, being risk averse to being risk informed. And, you know, our reporting policy is a pretty comprehensive policy that, addresses a number of different areas. And I think it was really facilitated by adopting origami risk a number of years ago that allowed us to provide, relatively brief forms to our employees. Each of our employees have phones and they have an app on their phone, and they can reach a number of different departments depending on, you know, which button they they push to then provide reporting information on a really timely basis. And that’s a key element of our reporting policy is, reporting that, within a short period of time. We keep that form, short, but then, utilize, workflow, within origami to then send a an email to their supervisor, and to the employee for follow-up and get additional information. And then we’ve used some, other tools that have been added over the years for talk to text for the folks that, you know, aren’t great with with typing. They’d rather dictate the information. This allows us to, you know, request of our employees. They don’t just tell us when something significant has happened, But if there’s an information only, somebody has a slip, trip, fall, they’re not sure if they’re injured, go ahead and report it. So, you have a a minor incident, maybe at a customer premise, maybe it’s a claim, maybe it’s not, go ahead and report it. We’d rather know about it than not. And we we typically have about two to three, incidents, reported for every claim. So it’s a pretty significant, number of, reports that we get in. From there, you know, you have something like an injury that has, doctor treated or lost time. We can use workflow, to send an investigation out to our safety team, which really facilitates getting information in addition to what the employee provides. So our work comp, our claims department, our safety department really work together, collaborate, are taking a look at the information that comes into origami on a weekly basis. And then monthly, they send out a newsletter, to our operations group summarizing some of those trends. Again, trying to move us from, being risk averse to being risk risk, informed and aware. You know, situational awareness is a really key part of, of safety. And then on the more proactive side, we’ve been able to take some programs like the good catch close call. We now have a a team of folks that, oversee those, that are coming in from employees, making sure that they’re good quality, have, a lot of data in there, things that we’re doing for corrective actions. So, that plus, what was previously just a safety audit. You know, we’ve got about ten people in safety. We’ve used origami to leverage our, workers out in the field, and now those are field safety observations. You know? Observation having a better connotation than than Audit. You know, audit. Yeah. Exactly. And so, you know, we’ve really taken those thirty five hundred employees and helped them to understand what’s going on out in the field. And we’ve had you know, we didn’t, put this in place until the the beginning of the calendar year, but we’ve already had forty one hundred field safety observations. So all that helps us become, you know, more aware and informed of what’s going on out in the field. Yeah. And if I could just dovetail into that, you know, I think, you know, Eric, you know, what we see, in in, not just working with you, but, you know, across the country is having those strong processes and procedures are key. It doesn’t happen by accident. So, you know, you have to figure out how do we standardize this? You know, how do we have the information coming in in a way that, you know, it’s not just it’s really just not just reporting the claim. Right? But it’s also how are we going to be able to then analyze that data and and and collect it for that purpose, which is different than collecting it to resolve a claim. Right? And and I can say that, you know, Spire does a great job, you know, from where we’re sitting and looking at what our members report. You know, you you guys do a great job, you know, reporting up through us to give us a heads up of of what’s coming to your point, whether it’s a claim or not. And and that really helps our team kind of understand, you know, what’s happening and, and and really can react, you know, when something that does raise to the level that’s a claim, you know, for you that that comes to us, it it helps us really it gives us that heads up and helps us react. You know, while while we’re out there, same thing. We try not to call our, our visits audits either. You know, really a risk assessment in working with your team. And, and again, I I mentioned this this in the opening is that, you know, we really try to be an extension of your team to understand, you know, what is it that drives you? How do we help you spread that message and really be, you know, again, an ambassador or just an extension of your team? And, you know, if we’re out on-site and we see something, you know, we’re in the same vein. Like, if it’s the, you know, we call it our near miss program. So it’s something that we may not document in our risk assessment, but we’re not, we’re gonna fix it on the spot, right? We’re gonna have that conversation, you know, with your team, you know, while we’re out there. But again, to your point, your team usually does a pretty good job of identifying that before we do. But it’s important, right, that that I think, you know, and and, you know, I mentioned my army time too. I mean, you know, having those standards and sticking to the standard, you know, if you walk by something and you don’t uphold the standard, you just set a new standard. Right? And so, I think it’s great, you know, you mentioned those, you have a process, you have procedures, and and again, not just when we look at claims management, but also when we’re looking at just, you know, operations and how you do your business. Right? Do you have good processes, procedures, are you following them? So I think, that that that’s a that’s a great point about how you kinda get that information out to everybody and collect the information in in a standard way. Yeah. We try and reinforce to our employees if you see something, say something. That old motto and, you know, helps people be better aware of situations that could be an issue, or that may come up later. And you you mentioned, you know, it doesn’t happen by accident. That was kind of funny that, in our last, safety summit, we’re coming on our twelfth one, that we’ll have in Birmingham, in about a month. But, the last one that we had in Kansas City last year, it was, you know, don’t learn safety by accident. You know? It’s always better to learn from something else than than to undergo that experience yourself. Exactly. Yeah. So, Tim and then Eric, just kinda following up on that. So from a Tim’s perspective, I imagine, know, your policyholders are always asking you, like, for benchmarking. Right? Is that something that Absolutely. You know, like, getting a better handle on this data that Spire gives you, like, gives you some perspective from a objective view? Yeah. Absolutely. I I you know, I can’t think of a of a company that’s not interested in, you know, how are we performing, right, against our our peers. And and again, whether that’s just, you know, benchmarking be tricky. Some people only like benchmarking when they’re above the benchmark. And other people say question, yeah, question the benchmark. But I think, you know, we’re all under the, responsibility, right, to understand where we stand, right, and where we can improve, not just for the industry, but just the safety of our own personnel. Right? And and as we mentioned, it’s a dangerous product, both on the gas side and the electric side. You know, a lot of people don’t really understand what it takes to you flip the white light switch and expect it to go on, but there’s a lot that happens, and and it’s dangerous. It’s it’s, so, you know, we we do have that responsibility, to provide good and solid benchmarking data and information. So, again, we will collect information from our members, specifically in the claims area. We will provide them with information on how, you know, they stack up against others, you know, that we see or other peer groups. We talk about that. You know, I’m not on the underwriting side, but we certainly talk about that on the underwriting side when we look at renewals. But beyond that, you know, we try to look at, you know, to Eric’s point, you know, what’s what are those, you know, pre indicators, right, that there may be something that goes wrong so we can avoid that from happening in the future. And that’s where I think our risk assessments come in into play. We look at operations. We look at procedures. We look at folks, you know, are are following them. We look to see if they’re consistent. There’s a lot of, and this is true in SPIRE too, some m and a activity and and and things going on to where, you know, you may be doing it great in one, operating company, but maybe that word hasn’t traveled to a different operating company. You know, maybe there’s a model practice somewhere or best practice that you can share. So, you know, we really try to look at benchmarking both within a company. Is everybody on the same page? And then within, you know, peer groups that make sense, you know, between our membership. And so we do we do score, certain operational areas where we’re out on-site, both on the on the gas and and the electric side. You know, we share those ratings with our members, and it’s relatively new that we’re sharing that information externally, but we are now in the process of putting together, you know, peer groups, where members can take a look at their operations and see how they’re doing, you know, with with, with folks that are, you know, relatively close to their their same size or scale of operation. Yeah. And, Eric go ahead. Yeah. The, utility industry is a little bit different than other industries. There’s there’s not the same level of competition between companies, and people are a little bit more, you know, forthright and sharing of, information. And then, you know, because we’re fairly, regulated, there’s a lot of information that we produce as well that’s that’s shared publicly. And so, industry associations like the American Gas Association or the Edison Electric Institute, do a great job of helping to disseminate that information so people have a a good feel as to where they stand. I I agree with you, Tim. Everybody looks at, benchmarks and say, well, we’re a little bit different. You know, that’s apples and oranges. But you can always tell trend wise, you know, are we headed in the right direction? Yeah. I think that that that’s so true. And and and, again, I I think just, you know, having that responsibility of understanding, you know, where you stand. And and I would agree with you that the sharing of information in this industry is well beyond things I’ve seen in others. Let’s just say that. I I think the goal is just to get it right. Like, when when there’s an accident, nobody wants that to be repeated. I mean, there’s there’s lies on the line here. Right? So it’s yeah. It’s about, you know, doing, doing what we need to do profitably, but it’s also about doing it safely, you know? And there’s nobody out there that wants an incident, obviously. And, you know, again, maybe I go back to my army days here, but when there’s something would happen, you’d have an after action review, you’d talk about what happened, you’d share the lessons learned, you’d focus on the process, not the people. And even if it was tough news, you you took the tough news and you learned from it, you you implemented it. So, again, I think you guys do a great job with that, and I think the industry as a whole, you know, really wants to obviously not not see any incidents happen out there. I mean, my experience with the RIMS, especially in the risk management industry, is I haven’t to this day met, anybody who oversees risk management who doesn’t wanna share what they’re doing with another risk manager or doesn’t wanna learn from another risk manager about what they’re doing. So it’s it’s great. I love I love the partnership and collaboration across, to your point, Eric. It’s not really like competition when losses are involved. Right? So Yeah. Absolutely. So so leading into that kind of question around, you know, like, your practices for claims management. Can you just tell us a little bit about and I know personally how, you know, you’ve had really strong risk risk management, really strong claims management practices when Origami started working with you, but how have you taken that? Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. It’s, it it this is sort of, you know, what helps us move from being, you know, risk aware to risk capable. And, you know, a a good portion of that, I mentioned earlier that, you know, we get two to three times as many incidents as we do claims. So you’ve got a lot of information coming in. And we’re a little bit different than many of our peers in that we’re self administered. So we have our own adjusters. We have four adjusters for our claims area and two for our work comp. So we’re processing all this information ourselves, and a system like origami really helps us do that efficiently. Even more important in my mind is when you have those employees out in the field, they’re busy doing their work, and you wanna make that as light on them as possible again. So using, you know, user friendly forms, keep things relatively brief, have some drop downs. So not only can you report categorized, but it’s also a lot easier for them to work with that. Those are our key elements. And then as I mentioned before, you know, timeliness. You know, certainly, in the claims world, you know, the quicker you respond, the better the outcome generally. You know, there’s nothing like, a claimant, you know, wondering, if anybody’s going to reach out to them, if anybody’s going to help, with the situation. So getting that call and saying, hey. We we understand, you know, the situation occurred. Let’s let’s talk about it. Let’s understand what’s going on. Let’s let’s see if, you know, this can be addressed. So timeliness is important. An unusual situation that we have for Missouri is we’ve got a five year statute of limitations. Not many states have something like that. And, you know, not all attorneys are like this, but there are some that, lo and behold, the notice of litigation will come four years, eleven months, and some odd days after an incident. Having that information in our system, from something that, you know, could have developed into a claim, but, it didn’t. But, you know, four years later, somebody brings that up. They’re, you know, they’re counting on you not to have information about that. The only person that might have information typically, would be the claimant. And so this puts us in a better position of having information on what the situation was, who was involved, so puts us in a better position. Some of the things that we do on just managing the claim, we had a kind of a trend that was both positive and negative out in the field where people wanted to provide that service. If they were out doing some excavation and a customer had like a a lawn irrigation system, occasionally, those would be hit by our employees. And, you know, trying to provide service, they would do what we call self fixes, and, you know, repair that. And if they didn’t have the parts, that meant they were, you know, going out to a hardware store. If they didn’t do it right, though, it could result in an even bigger claim. And so we used origami to identify those situations where those types of events occur, then worked with the preferred vendor in the area, so that the employee could go on with the rest of their day. We would contact their preferred vendor. They’d come in, do the fix. Overall, you know, a lot more, efficient, and, obviously, you know, lost control, for those situations where it wasn’t quite fixed, the way they thought it should. One of the things I’m really proud of is in this part because of the flexibility of origami. So we got to know the system. We were looking at one of the biggest areas of concern on my part, which is dig ins. When people run fiber down a a neighborhood, a lot of times, they’ll hit our pipes, and that that can result in a pretty dangerous situation, but it’s also pretty expensive to fix that. So we were able to use our operational systems integrating with, Origami to to get that information to our damage prevention folks. And we developed a new area, and it’s basically like a property subrogation, a module that we have. So our damage coordinators understand, you know, what’s going on out in the field. They can get the information on, who hit it, when, what were they doing, use that for risk scoring to better understand when they get locate requests. Okay. That’s one of those problematic, vendors. Let me go out there and do an audit. Or, hey. I’ve seen this name a bunch of times in our system, so let me go out there and do some education, with those folks. But, also, you know, it gives us the information to deal with enforcement activities in the state. Since we put that system in, we’re able to do as many in a month that we used to do in a year. And so it helps us try and get ahead of what is a pretty significant concern on our part, which is, you know, people digging in, and that allows us to create a report that looks an awful lot like a bill, send that out to, those people that dig into our system. So our customers aren’t paying for that. It’s the person that damaged our system. I I think audit is the right term to use for that scenario. Right. It is definitely an odd term. I I mean, I I think you brought up some some some key points there, Eric. And I and, you know, it it’s great to see again that some of the things you brought up in the front end of that part of the discussion was more on how you’re using the data, right, to actually improve your processes. It wasn’t even about claims management. Right? We got kinda got to that towards the end, but but obviously, it serves both purposes. Right? And and I think, you know, having a strong system and process in order to do, you know, enable to enable you to analyze that data and and make corrective actions, again, hopefully, before other things happen, you know, or or to help, reduce your costs is critical. I mean, you know, that’s what we do for, you know, a living at Aegis, you know, is collect the claims data, right, manage the claims, but, you know, even even with us, I would tell you that we’re continuously looking at how we collect that data, you know, is there a smarter or better way to do it or to categorize things, you know, so that we can, again, offer insights back to our members, you know, in a more efficient, manner. You know, I I started my career in in, you know, in loss control actually as a Six Sigma, you know, black belt way back in the day with GE, and, so that’s kind of ingrained in a little bit is, you know, how you collect data, is it repeatable, is it reproducible, and then, you know, if you’re spending the time and energy on it, you know, you would then, you know, have the responsibility to conduct that analysis, right? I I I say that all the time, like, are we using that data for anything? And if we’re not, then we’re it does take you mentioned your, you know, frontline employees. It takes time and effort and and money to collect that information. So, you know, I think having a dedicated process to say that, yes, we are gonna analyze that data, we’re gonna share that information, we’re gonna then learn, do we have holes in that data, can we improve the the data collection process. It’s just a continuous improvement, you know, process with the eye towards not just managing the claim effectively, but also looking at the data that you’re bringing in, how you’re analyzing that data and providing insights back to your your employees and, in our case, back to our members. Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that’s the critical aspect of it. You know, technology is helping to facilitate this information sharing, this information, analysis that then sees those trends. Okay. Now what are the proactive actions that we’re gonna do? But in the end, it’s it’s really getting that information out to people, collaborating with them, thinking about what can we do differently based off this information. Here’s what we’re seeing. Okay. Let’s come up with some solutions on how we address that. You know, the technology, you know, helps to facilitate it, but it’s the it’s the people that really help make that happen. Yeah. Absolutely. And the fact that you’re doing it across disciplines, I mean, that that’s another thing we see is that sometimes you do a great job collecting the data, but it it might be kind of locked in its own container, right, there’s no way to link it up to other information or get people to kind of see the results of that data, so you know one of the things we try to do is make sure that whenever we’re collecting data from one of our different departments, whether it be claims, loss control, or underwriting, that there’s some sort of key in there. You know, we involve IT to make sure that they can talk to each other. Otherwise, having our stand alone risk assessment data, that’s great for us and and and allows loss control to kinda get information out, but it’s not great for the company because, you know, we can’t link that up. Well, okay, well, how does that risk assessment area are we having claims in that area? Like, well, I don’t know. So, luckily, we do know because, yeah, you you put a key in there, right, or a way to link that data up or work with your IT department, But you should just consider that, because if you build these stand alone systems that can’t talk to each other, you’re you’re not maximizing the use of the data across the company. Yeah. And then we, you know, we take that data and have, you know, monthly, company wide safety meetings. Part of that information is sharing metrics, not just on the claims, but also as I mentioned earlier, how timely those claims were, were incidents always submitted. And so people are seeing that, sort of going back to the what gets measured gets done, you know, providing that report that shows them, okay, how are we doing, you know, really puts an emphasis on this. This is critical to the company. We wanna see us do very well in these areas, so let’s let’s talk about how we’re doing. Yeah. That’s, like, it just becomes part of the culture, like you said. Yeah. It’s excellent. Okay. So, the role that collaboration with external partners plays in your strategy, can you tell us a little bit more? We started talking a little bit about that. But But Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s, you know, as we were talking about culture, it’s, you know, that’s people. People is is is is collaboration and, you know, working with others. And, obviously, that happens quite a bit within everybody’s company, but there are some really important areas where we collaborate externally. You know, the first and foremost is with the, first responders that we have that, will show up to an incident. And if that’s the first time that we’ve sort of coordinated with them, first time they’ve ever seen us, that could be a problem. You know, we host a, fire training school, at our company, and we do that in Missouri and Alabama, to, you know, facilitate not just the the training on the, you know, how to deal with an incident, but also to, you know, get people comfortable how you coordinate with an incident because you do have two groups of folks between the first responders and our, you know, frontline workers are there to make things gas safe, you know, both working together in a pretty, you know, tense situation. So that, collaboration is critical in always putting the priority on life and property. And, you know, the last thing is, you know, maintaining service. So, that’s, you know, one of the key ones that we have. I mentioned earlier the industry associations. I’m sure all the listeners here probably have some form of industry association. Again, we do a really good job of collecting data from members, whether it’s the American Gas Association or the Edison Electric Institute, grabbing that information and then doing something with it. They host committees where they get people together. We share best practices. They also do a more formal peer review where they’ll take a function or a process, go to a a host company, have discussions on it, people will share, best practices. So that really facilitates that. I think since twenty fifteen, I was reading on, their site just trying to do a little prep for this. About three hundred of those peer reviews, I wouldn’t have guessed as many of those, but, quite a few of them that they’ve done. And then they also host a natural gas exercise where you can do tabletop exercises for, you know, both disaster preparedness and business continuity. You know, everybody’s got their vendors and the, you know, brokers are a really good source of information on risk management. They’ve seen other companies like yourselves have information that they can help share. And then, you know, of course, you know, part of, you know, Tim on this call. And, you know, what we do is have a real, you know, partnership with Aegis. It’s a it’s a mutual company, and so the members are, you know, part and parcel of the company. And, you know, it’s not the only type of, insurance company that does loss control. You know, other people listening to this, you you may wanna reach out to your insurers and see if they have funds available for loss control. But, you know, I was just a couple weeks ago, we had a project out in Wyoming where we’re doing an expansion. You just came out and did some, loss control review of that. And in a few weeks, I’ll be down in, Mobile, Alabama with, Bill Burnett doing a risk assessment for our our Spire Gulf and Spire Mississippi utilities, you know, again, getting those folks together and talking about those best practices. Yeah. And I would say, you know, it’s great teamwork there, Eric. I mean, all of our folks, you know, have come from the utility, so we’re we’re not sending folks in who aren’t experienced. So you can snip that out pretty quick when somebody shows up on-site. So Absolutely. We have plant managers, operation managers, up thirty five years average experience in the field, so, but you know what, we can’t do what we do without member support, and without, you know, cooperation, and we learn, you know, as much being out on-site from what different companies are doing across the country, and taking again some of those best practices back. I was at a gas operator training earlier this year and they they went around the room. I didn’t know I was gonna be participating in this in this particular exercise, but it was an icebreaker and they were asking, hey, kinda what keeps you up at night? You know? And and it really it really it kinda drove home what we do and why we do it because because most of the comments were, I just, I don’t want to make a mistake, you know, I want to get home safely tonight, you know, that was, those were the comments and, and it got to me and I thought, you know, what keeps me up at night is do, do we know something that we have not effectively communicated out to everybody, you know, to help prevent an incident from happening? So, you know, with open, communication and feedback, from you and other members, you know, we’re able to then kind of aggregate that information and and share it back out. And and, you know, we’re reaching maybe different levels of the organization too. Right? Like, so you mentioned tabletop exercises. Well, you know, we’ve done some of the same things. Right? Looking at incident first responder, you know, incidents where we’ll mock up an exercise and and, you know, let the appropriate people know that it’s not real, but but head out and go do a mock exercise. Let’s see what happens. Do we do we follow processes, procedures, you know, test those, you know, whether it be a tabletop or whether it be a live, you know, incident. You know, we can check call centers, right, and go in there and say, okay, are the call center operators following the correct script? Because that’s sometimes the first line of defense, you know, the public, are you, you know, or do they have to understand the sense of urgency, you know, around the situation? So, you know, you know, again, I said this before, but it it is truly our goal to be an extension. You know, the risk management team’s there. Yes, we’re performing a risk assessment and, yes, there’ll probably be some suggestions, but, you know, those suggestions, are typically in areas where either something, you know, really should be done because, you know, we all need to operate safely and efficiently and some might just be a best practice, you know, you may be doing it really well in your area, but we might see something for the first time, we’re like, wow, oh, okay, that’s a different way to handle things and, you know, we should share that and not that you have to, but it’s just FYI, here’s what’s happening in other parts of the country. So, yeah, it’s a great collaboration, you know, when we go out there, we’re learning as much, and we do have things we do set aside time internally for us to share that information because, again, you again, maybe it’s the Six Sigma background, but you need processes. If you don’t have them, things don’t happen. So, you know, we do set aside time to come back together and talk internally and work in groups and other things that we have to formalize what we’re seeing out there so that we’re not just sharing it at, you know, on-site, but we also can aggregate, you know, critical information that we feel we can communicate through, you know, member wide type communications that we have. But, yeah. Yeah. Great. I think we have one more talking point here. So, in terms of being proactive with your claims management, how does that affect, your captive and, your renewals? Yeah. I mentioned earlier that, you know, somewhat unique in that we self administer. Having a a captive insurance company, essentially, it’s a it’s a true insurance company. We have to be, approved by the Department of Insurance in the state that we operate in, to provide that insurance. In effect, it’s not too different than, you know, most people would see with a large self retention. And, so it’s it’s a way for us to essentially be involved in the claims process, not just from, okay, you know, we wanna prevent something happening in the good catch close call and field safety observations to, okay, let’s report on an incident even though it may not become one. Okay. It’s become one. Let’s reach out and do something, you know, within the the first twenty four hours, make sure we talk to, either the injured employee or the claimant. This is closing that loop on, okay, what happens when, you know, funds have to be paid out, for, the, claim. And so it it it brings home, you know, a little bit more insight than you might gain otherwise. But, again, I think, you know, some folks out there probably experience a similar thing if they have a large, retention. You know, there’s nothing that adds emphasis and prioritization like dollars. And so when you transfer that risk to somebody else, you know, that’s what the insurance industry is. When you have your own captive, you’re bringing some of that back into house. And so, you know, while the information really hasn’t changed, the emphasis that is put behind it is a little bit different, and I think it provides some value to the company. And, also, you know, working with an actuary, the you know, again, it’s a true insurance company, so we have actuaries review our claims. We do this twice a year. Having discussions with them, you know, provides us some insights into areas that they look at, and we’ll give them over ten years worth of loss information. They can spot trends and ask questions about that. It also helps us give a, you know, a little bit better appreciation for the underwriter at the other side of the table. You know, we’re essentially our own underwriter for these things and, you know, improves a presentation, that may, you know, convey a certain amount of information to hey. You know, hopefully, you know, you’re interested in, you know, taking this risk on for x amount of dollars to, hey. We’re in this boat together. It’s going to hit us, just as much as as it hits you. We’re we’re just, as as vested in preventing a claim from occurring. And so for me, that’s that’s something, that really provides value. You know, going back to the, you know, you know, not learning by accident. I’ve got a I’ve got a saying that I use with with my sons that, you know, everybody has accidents. It’s only a mistake when you don’t learn from them. And, you know, having that end to end view of things really helps you learn from them. And, you know, that accidents will occur. But if you can prevent the next one, then then it’s not a mistake. Yeah. And I I I don’t have a, you know, a a a ton to add on on the captive side except that, you know, in that captive, you’re really doing the same kind of things we’re doing with our data. Right? Analyzing that information. You We can certainly help in that respect as well. We’re happy to share, obviously, you know, our claims experience and and talk through with with, with our members who have captives. And and it really is about the analysis of of the data. And and, you know, honestly, being a mutual, we’re kind of in the same boat. Right? A loss is a loss, right, to the mutual and to everybody who’s a part of it. So, you know, we have that same kind of focus that the captives have as well and and, you know, try to support our members as well as we can in that area as well. Yeah. We, you know, for better or worse, don’t have the same ability to diversify our risk. So, you know, we can’t spread it across a number of companies, so we had better get it right. We’re very motivated to get it right. But then that’s also the positive is, you know, we’re we’re able to manage the things that impact us financially. It’s not, you know, somebody else did something and and, you know, rates are going up. It’s it’s us. If we have somebody to blame, it’s only us. If we have somebody to benefit, we want it to be us as well. Okay. So before we get into some questions that I think have come in, you know, I just wanted to, recap what it is that we’ve talked about. Strong safety culture, showing a commitment to all of your employees and your customers that, you know, Spire safety first and just being able to present, you know, on the spot reporting of even things that might be nothing. But if you’ve got a five year statute of limitations in some cases, I mean, you could be sitting in a courtroom in five years. So, you know, that’s that’s a great, great anecdote there. The improvement of the claims processes, you know, that that that will bring better results. I think that’s what we, you know, that’s what we heard. Collaboration with not just your partners in the insurance side of things, but also, first responders and vendors and, industry associations. Great collaboration there. The technology, I mean, it it goes without saying that you need a strong platform that’s gonna grow with you. And as you evolve your practice over time, certainly, you would expect technology to evolve with you and and continually offer you, innovative features to work with. Certainly, certainly a strong point there. And and some of the other things that we touched on, just, your embrace of good catch and near miss. And something I hear from it, literally everyone I talk to is gotta get, a better handle on just wanna know everything that’s happening out there, even if people don’t think it’s a big deal. Right? They’ll see something, say something. I mean, that’s crucial, and and it’s a a perfect place to utilize technology. And then, any kind of lessons that we’ve learned here? I I think this this has been really quantifiable in terms of just demonstrating how, you gentlemen have both just kinda worked, in terms of, you know, improving the losses there. So some of the questions that we have here, any specific metrics or reports, that your leadership team finds impactful? I know you do weekly summaries of incidents. They probably aren’t looking at that. Right? But, you know, what’s what’s something you could you could speak to there? Yeah. As as I mentioned before, we have, you know, monthly safety meetings that we have people from out the, the company attend. This includes, leadership and, you know, one of the metrics that we take a look at, again, what gets measured gets done is understanding how often our our leaders are engaged in safety discussions. It goes so far as our CEO, is involved in bimonthly, you know, safety discussions, with the folks out in the field. So better understanding of what’s going on through that reporting. Taking that to the next level, you know, we put, a number of these into annual incentive plans. Again, nothing motivates folks like like dollars. You know, numbers are are numbers. They they, you know, can mean something, but everybody knows what a dollar means. So, having that some something that, people take a look at, whether it’s, field safety observations being reported, at fault motor vehicle accidents, trying to reduce the the number of third party damages to our sixty three thousand miles of pipeline. You know, all those things are very important. So we take a look at those numbers and then report on those, and, a number of those work their way into, our annual incentive plan to make sure that that’s a really high priority for everybody. Yeah. And I would I would say in supporting that and our members, you know, obviously, claims is a is a key driver of our overall cost. Right? So we’re always measuring how we’re doing versus what we plan, but we’re also looking at trends. Right? How are these claims trending over time? You know, is there is an incident that happened, you know, ten years ago, how is that incident treated today? You know, is it gonna be is it gonna be, you know, different and expensive? The answer is yes, it’s gonna be more expensive. Right? So just just kind of tracking that and seeing how that impacts it, and and informing the membership of the trends that we’re seeing, you know, when it comes to claims. And then we we talk a lot about benchmarking, but that’s probably the number one thing we get asked about as well. Really good. So this, you know, this whole call, we’ve talked about process improvements with you both. How do you go about, taking standardized processes and then, you know, adapting those to different kind of business sites or, business units as they need some variation there? Yeah. You know, that that’s a really critical question for us. You know, we grew through acquisitions. Again, I was, you know, part of that back in, you know, twenty thirteen through twenty sixteen. We went from about, you know, six hundred and fifty thousand customers up to one point seven million. That’s bringing in multiple different companies, different cultures. Each has their own inertia. This is how we like to do it. But then going back to what I mentioned earlier, you have different states have different requirements. And so sometimes you can’t always align your, o and m manual and can’t always have people doing the same things because they’re different requirements. Sometimes, you know, those just developed over the years. Tim, you mentioned, you know, utility workers tend to be long lived in their, tenure. So, yeah, it’s not unusual to see people, with thirty five, forty. We we just had somebody with over sixty years of experience, at the utility. And so, you know, those things do develop, but, it it’s important for us to not have those differences just be this is the way we like to do it because then you end up with, you know, multiple ways of, doing things like, you know, our our meters. We had over probably, eighty different types of meters out in the different utilities. We’re working towards a standard where we have just five, and it’s mostly dependent on the size of the the user. And so having some level of standardization reduces costs and then allows people to, you know, have, you know, sharing of information that that, you know, we can learn from each other instead of saying, well, my way is better than your way. K. Well, if it’s better, let’s learn from that. Let’s adopt that. I I think that last point you made is key, and when we look at our risk assessment process, it’s a standard template, right, that we use when we’re out there, but certainly we need to account for regional differences, right, what what might be true in one region may not work for another region, especially, you know, wildfire has been a been a very big topic for us in recent years, you know, you’re not gonna do, you know, this you’re not gonna take the same risk mitigation efforts in maybe a low priority area that you might take in a high priority area, and it’s not, you know, just you you can’t do it from a cost standpoint and and it wouldn’t be effective, it would be the right thing to do. So, you know, just allowing for those regional differences, I think is critical. But to your point, that shouldn’t happen just because, you know, folks aren’t focused on it and and and thinking, hey, you know, this is the way we do it here, there may be a better way to do it. But absolutely you need to allow, you know, I think the example you gave of the meters is a great one, right? We’re not, we’re not gonna have thirty something, but we will have five something. Right? We’ll we’ll allow some difference, but we’re not gonna allow that level of of of, differentiation out there. Yeah. We we’ve learned so much when we have folks like Bill come and talk to us because they’ve seen things that have happened at other utilities. They can talk about, a situation that may be, you know, one in several, you know, million that that, you know, chance occurs. So maybe it doesn’t happen to us, but they can take that information and say, okay. Here’s what happened with this other utility. Here’s, you know, what they’ve done to address that. Here’s some of the underlying causes. And so, you know, like we mentioned earlier, you don’t have to learn safety by accident. Sharing that information on what what’s happened to to others in the industry is really beneficial for us because that’s, you know, a much better way of learning. Yeah. Really good. We had a we had another question here. Is there a specific document or information or date you can use for claim reviews? I’m not positive I fully understand the the the question. But, you know, as I mentioned, the approach that, Origami was taking with claims managed, probably not a whole lot different from from what others do. Having that in the system with some level of flexibilities allows us to customize the fields that that are important to us, gather information to then slice and dice that information in ways that are meaningful to us. And, you know, unfortunately, we can’t always get that right coming out of the gate, and it gets adopted over the years. And so, things get added or subtracted that, we’ve we find, more and more useful. We’ll take a category, maybe subdivide it into two or three because there’s aspects of it that, you know, are more important to us. So, you know, I don’t know that there’s anything that sort of works across, you know, a bunch of different areas, but having that flexibility, seeing what the information is telling you and, you know, where what else do we wanna capture. While the text box is great, you can’t really learn a whole lot from it unless you’re willing to read through it. If you’ve got thousands of of of claims to look through, it’s not as informative. Yeah. I’d agree. And I think I think the the key is to get started. Right? Try it and and and see. Right? You and you may find, wow. I can’t analyze this the way I want to or I’m not getting the information I want to. Then you have to look back and say, well, how am I collecting this? It doesn’t make sense to make changes for that. But but have again, I know I keep going back to process, but having a process and and a regular review period, whatever that period is, whatever works for your company. And just to get started, you you’ll you’ll see where the holes are, and then you can adjust from there. Well, I wanna thank you both, for a very insightful review of the your claims and and incident and reporting safety and just your whole culture, and it’s been great. I’ve learned a lot. I know everyone else has. And, we just wanna leave a little plug here that if anyone wants to know a little bit more about us, they can scan the QR code or go to our website. And if anyone wants to reach out to either of you, I’m sure you’re more than welcome to receiving questions. So feel free Absolutely. Link do a LinkedIn connect with, either of the gentlemen here if you’d like. Thank you again, Eric. Thank you, Tim. We really appreciate it. And, handing it back to you, Jennifer. Thank you to Rems for your help. Absolutely. Yeah. I just wanna say give a big, special thank you to Eric Lobser of Spire Energy, Tim Heinze of Aegis, and Jeff Enzinger of Origami Risks for their time and expertise. The Origami Risks team has your questions and will reply directly to anyone’s they didn’t get to during the presentation, and a copy of this webinar will be archived on rims dot org within a few business days. In the meantime, as Jeff said, there’s lots of resources for you all to access. You can scan the QR code on your screen right now or visit origami risk dot com and follow origami risk on LinkedIn. And just as a reminder, Origami Risk will be a gold sponsor at the RIMS conference twenty twenty five in Seattle, Washington. Registration is now open, so save the dates for November seventeenth and eighteenth. Finally, RIMS is global, and we’d love for you to build your network with us. Visit rims dot org slash membership to apply for a RIMS membership today. Thank you all, and stay safe. Thank you.