A Public Service Electric and Gas Company

The Client

The public service electric and gas company located in New Jersey is the third largest public utility company in the United States, supplying electrical power to a three-state region. The client provides almost 70% of New Jersey's utility energy. But deregulation was on the horizon, and the utility company was forced to shift their strategy from a traditional, regulated monopoly environment to a competitive market for power generation. Utility organizations must constantly consider th regulatory, political, and legal reprecussions of operational procedures, there is a heavy demand for compliance and documentation. In publically regulated industries such as utilities, document management and workflow process software are critical to maintaining compliant operations. New Jersey's public service electric and gas company chose McFadyen Solutions as their technology partner because of McFadyen's deep technical knowledge and years of success equipping large organizations to achieve regulatory compliance and competive differentiation. The utility company is headquartered in Newark, NJ, and the solution has been implemented across sites in Salem, NJ, Trenton, NJ, and Washington, D.C.

The Business Challenge

The challenge and goal of this specific project was to upgrade business processes in the Environmental, Health, & Safety division. The McFadyen Solutions implementation focused organizing and managing vast numbers of documents across multiple facilities to maintain auditable, regulatory compliance.

The Return On Investment

New Jersey's public service electric and gas company is enjoying improved processes in four distinct areas of their Environmental, Health, & Safety division as a result of the business process improvements implemented by McFadyen Solutions:

1. The Occupational, Health, and Safety (OHS) department. This enhancement focused on managing two types of OSHA forms, Injury/Illness Reports and Exposure Reports. Custom screens have been developed to automate much of the registration process. It is important for this department to search on a number of different fields for statistical and reporting purposes in addition to retrieving the documents. Therefore, several custom tables have been constructed for look-up attributes entered at registration time.
   
2. The Estuary Enhancement Program (EEP) was created to monitor the environment effects of the nuclear power plant in Salem, NJ. Most of the resulting reports are submitted from specialists in paper form. EEP is able to scan and OCR the documents to allow content-based searching of them. Color photos are also being registered. Gathering document-level content reliably and quickly will have a considerable impact on getting together the case for renewing the nuclear plant license. The groups involved in working on the renewal application will have remote access to the relevant EEP documents.
   
3. The Licenses and Permits Department (L&P) has clients which are other departments within their company. L&P tracks and stores permits, which consist of correspondence, maps, approvals, and other supporting documents. These permits must be carefully tracked both while in progress and afterwards. It is critical that updated maps are inserted where necessary and that all related correspondence and reference documents are included. The License and Permit department can now store and manage these permits, some of which can include hundreds of pages worth of documents. The permit components are undergoing both scan and OCR before being registered into the system. This process enables content-based searching across permits, an impossible task with paper files.