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Director of Risk and Insurance Management
Advance Auto Parts

Appealing to the Heart

Gary Nesbit of Advance Auto Parts makes driving and working safer for more than 52,000 of his fellow employees.


There is very special meaning to the life dates "1990-2011" appearing on the opening screen of Advance Auto Parts' new online interactive defensive driving course. These dates represent the life and death years of Advance sales person Krystal McDuffie, who was killed on July 11, 2011 when her car was struck by a truck.

Those dates are followed by a message on the interactive defensive driving site from CEO Darren Jackson, who met with Krystal McDuffie's family in the aftermath of her death and emphasized the company's renewed commitment to taking proactive, preventative measures to ensure the safety of all team members.

To make good on Jackson's promise to the McDuffie family, Director of Risk and Insurance Management Gary Nesbit was chosen to spearhead a cross-functional partnership between the office of the CEO and the operations and organizational development teams at Advance to promote greater employee safety, especially on the road.

"Even though we had started working on the online defensive driving program before Krystal's death, what we wanted to do was incorporate the accident into our program to appeal to both the head but also the heart of employees," said Nesbit, who became the director of risk and insurance management at Advance Auto Parts in 2010.

There are two safety programs spearheaded by Nesbit that bear the imprint of Krystal McDuffie's legacy. One is the ambitious interactive online defensive driving program put in place on April 1, 2012.

The training features interactive modules built around the company's top five causes of preventable vehicle collisions: back-up safety, intersection safety, rear-end collisions, surroundings and wave throughs (when a driver pulls into traffic after being "waved through" by another driver).

Participants are required to test their existing knowledge of safe driving habits before being presented with the company's safety materials. In each case, team members are asked to interact and select answers that demonstrate their understanding of the desired skill. Use of actual team members in real driving situations lends additional credibility to the training course. The program concludes with a quiz and each member is asked to make a personal commitment to safe driving.

The second innovation implemented early this year by Nesbit and his team after McDuffie's death was the introduction of interactive safety training modules focused on a different safety topic each month, such as slip-and-fall prevention, safe lifting and ladder safety. Each of these safety modules takes a personal approach similar to that of the defensive-driving program by focusing on a single accident.

Even at this early date, the two safety programs have achieved impressive results.

Since the introduction of the interactive online defensive driving program, the company has seen a 17 percent reduction in reportable collisions; a 9 percent reduction in preventable auto collision claims; a 28 percent reduction in rear-end collisions, and a 32 percent reduction in auto liability claims related to rear-end collisions.

Most importantly, there have been no auto-related fatalities since the creation and rollout of this program at the Roanoke, Va.-based company.

The introduction of the monthly safety training modules has yielded similarly impressive results. Team member slip-and-fall injuries have declined by 34 percent, customer claims have decreased by 36 percent, and customer litigation has declined by 30 percent.

Susan Shemanski, the company's vice president of client services, said of Nesbit: "Gary has brought every level of the company into this training, so that it has become important to the people at the top of the company down to the people who are on the road every day, which I think is one of the leading reasons that everybody in the company is focused on interactive safety initiatives. Rather than just sending out a brochure with driving techniques, Gary made things very interactive and thus greatly enhanced the learning process."

"We've been doing this a long time," Nesbit said, "which is why we find when you partner with all kinds of team members you can deliver a product that better meets the needs of our customers and team members."
--By Steve Yahn

Safety First

Gary Nesbit of Advance Auto Parts was already working on a new company-wide car safety program when tragedy struck.

During a routine delivery, Krystal McDuffie, a 23-year-old Advance Auto Parts worker from Illinois, died in a car accident in July 2011. Her death only served to reaffirm the importance of what Nesbit had planned for the company.

"She was a mom with a two-year-old girl," said Nesbit. In response, Nesbit and the Advance team dedicated the entire safety program to McDuffie, hoping that associating the program with her would make employees take it more seriously.

Out of 52,000 employees, roughly 35,000 will drive a company car at some point, he said, so he created a defensive-driving program complete with a video containing a personal message from CEO Darren Jackson, stressing the importance of driver safety and discussing his visit with McDuffie's family after her fatal auto accident. The interactive, online training program set specific training programs for individual team members based on their job position.

"I saw a need for better training with our drivers," said Nesbit.

The 17 percent reduction in reportable collisions should go far in reducing workers' comp claims.

-- By Jared Shelly

Manager, Risk Projects
Sears Holdings Corp.


Holistic Workers' Comp Program Aided

A complex and robust database helps Sears Holdings reduce workers' comp costs and brings employees back to work faster.


With store locations as widespread and different in make-up as Sears and Kmart, it can be difficult to align efforts in corporate-wide programs. That's what happened when Sears initially tried to roll out a new return-to-work program years ago, said Carolyn McLain, manager, risk projects at Sears Holdings Corp.

"We found a lot of locations said they had return-to-work programs, but they really didn't," she said. In reality, a lot of associates weren't returned to work until they were released for full-time duty.

To significantly cut workers' comp costs and help associates stay in the workforce, Sears devised a program that increases communication and coordination -- and is backed by incentives to compel compliance.

And with nearly 4,000 full-line and specialty retail stores in the United States and Canada, as well as associates providing in-home appliance services and home-improvement services, that was no easy task.

A key part of Sears Holdings' RTW effort, she said, has been RiskConsole, a "robust claims database" that was developed with the assistance of their claims management database provider Aon eSolutions.

The innovative technology, which replaced an in-house system, improves collaboration around claims management, investigations and RTW programs between appropriate managers, employees, adjusters, the TPA (Sedgwick Claims Management Services Inc.), and Sears risk management and its team of seven workers' comp claims coordinators.

"It's a massive project," said Chad Levine, senior account executive at Aon eSolutions in Chicago, "and it's been going on for several years." The initial technology was launched in 2009, with the "mission-critical" elements, he said, but it has evolved since then with valuable add-ons. "Carolyn took the view that, 'I know all the questions the stores and field operations come to me with right now. If I, in a perfect world, can answer as many of those questions as possible and put that on their desktops, that's what I want to build,' " Levine said.

The technology provides information on lost work days, temporary modified duty days and OSHA data, and makes it easier for users to investigate and review "action plans" created by the Sedgwick claim examiner for their individual claims. Along with identifying and allowing for communication directly with the adjuster assigned to the claim, RiskConsole involves managers with claims in their locations or businesses, lets them see the TPA's action plan so they know what is being done to resolve the claims, has up-to-date financial information on claims, and allows managers to add their own notes and document conversations related to the claim.

"It's a real quick snapshot of what is going on with that claim for everybody to view," McLain said, noting that there are about 10,000 to 12,000 users throughout the workforce, including store managers, the TPA, claims coordinators, loss prevention personnel, field auditors, HR professionals and others.

"It's just continually growing," she said.

Levine said the solution is unique.

"There's only a handful of clients that have the size and scale of a Sears Holdings, in general. We have many large clients and some of them might be doing a part of what [Sears] is doing. ... I could count on one hand the companies with the same holistic return-to-work views as them."

The solution is even more complex because of the very different make-up of the various Sears Holdings' locations and services. Not only are Sears and Kmart "totally different beasts," he said, but some stores offer automobile services, some have pharmacies, some are distribution centers, some only sell hardware or home goods, etc.

"We really had to be flexible to accomplish that," Levine said.

As part of its RTW program, Sears charges each of its locations for any lost work days for which its TPA has to pay. That cost is now $500 a day -- for up to 90 days -- so an individual claim could result in a $45,000 charge, McLain said. "It comes off the bottom line, so it really has been an incentive for them to bring the associates back to work.

Corporate also charges locations if they fail to report workers' comp claims on a timely basis, she said. It's not just about cutting costs, she said, the aggressive efforts to bring employees back to work "let the associates know we care about them and it reduces litigation because we do keep communicating with them."

"It really has been a benefit to the corporation and to our associates and to our locations in getting those associates back to work," McLain said, noting that there is an increased emphasis on creating transitional work for employees who are not yet ready to return to their previous full-time duties.

And the results have been great, said McLain. "We cut our lost work days by approximately 50 percent."

--By Anne Freedman