South Australia’s City of Charles Sturt recognises the importance of having a well developed system for managing risk associated with Council activities and functions. Council has had a Geographical Information System (GIS), E-View, in place for some time, providing visual representation for a number of different areas including individual properties, compliance information, such as dangerous dogs, development information, and engineering information. Charles Sturt recently added another layer to the program that visually highlights the location of insurance claims in the Council area and helps to identify areas that require prioritisation in asset management programs.
Charles Sturt’s Acting Manager Governance and Operational Support, Kerry Constantine, said Council receives numerous insurance claims each year in relation to its infrastructure and assets.
“The Governance and Risk Team were previously using an Excel spreadsheet to record all insurance claims,” she said. “This spreadsheet was used for tracking claim progress and had some limited reporting. However, having claim data represented in this format made it difficult to ascertain areas with a high density of claims. The Governance and Risk Team approached Council’s Information Systems Department to assist in visually representing data already collected.”
The City of Charles Sturt can now show an insurance claim location as a visual representation on E-View. Claims are represented by different symbols to indicate different types and status of claims, for example ‘claim settled’ or ‘liability denied’.
“Visual representation allows us to increase our analysis of trends to another level,” Kerry Constantine said. “It enables easier analysis and identification of claims within various geographical areas where the number and density of claims may have increased. “Asset insurance claims are also represented on E-View which allows for the analysis of security of assets.”
The E-View system also has a wide range of searching capabilities that enable the user to obtain information about a claim using suburb, street name, claim number, dates, and internal record details.
“In the future, we hope the E-view system will result in a reduced number of incidents within our community, and this in turn will mean a reduction in the number of claims submitted,” Kerry Constantine said. “This will also lead to a reduction in the amount of time spent on insurance claim administration.”
For further information contact Kerry Constantine on (08) 8408 1203.
