Pacific Gas & Electric - Enterprise Corrective Action Program

[Richard_Howells]

Last week at Sapphire, Gary Close, the Director, Enterprise Corrective Action Program at Pacific Gas and Electric explained how his company Empower Employees Through Digital Transformation with an Enterprise Corrective Action Program.

Gary first explained that the “vision was to empower PG&E employees to make a difference.  This is enabled through an ECAP process that would  provide standardized governance and innovative tools for PG&E personnel to easily report, prioritize, track, trend and resolve issues, resulting in an enhanced safety culture, reduced risk and a more efficient and compliant organization”.

Gary explained that Corrective Actions Programs are important to ensure issues are documented and addressed so that you can learn from issues to prevent from happening again. Ultimately, when you can reduce operational risk you achieve smoother operations, improve cost effectiveness and increase customer satisfaction.

The CAP Project at PG&E

The project started in 2014, and when complete, it will replace standalone corrective action programs and roll out a uniform Corrective Action Program across 13 LOBs by end of 2017. The CAP solutions provide an interactive, real time access and reporting, through an easy to use interface, via the web or mobile devices.

The CAP process at PG&E is as follows:

1. Employee identifies an issue, via a mobile device or a portal
2. CAP TEAM reviews the issue, categorizes and assesses the risk and assigns an issue owner
3. Issue Owner performs a cause evaluation and provides a resolution
4. CAP Team assesses the effectiveness of the resolution

At present, there are 9000 users accessing CAP and to date 81,300 issues have been completed.

     

Critical Success Factors

Garry highlighted some of the critical success factors of the program.

• “We can’t fix what we don’t know about”, so it is critical to get user buy in and that they see the value.
• Funding, and senior executive support is critical to allow the  project team to iterate solution over longer period of time
• Modeled processes and technology on successful, existing PG&E solutions

Key take Aways

Gary also provided some words of wisdom that are valuable to all companies as they embark on implementation projects:

• Small Steps for Bigger Goals
• Value Realization to End Customer
• Don’t be afraid to adapt
• Employee Engagement is Critical
• Roadmap Socialization