Empowering field agents at Boardwalk Pipeline Partners

The Business Issue

Boardwalk Pipeline Partners (BPP), formed in 2005, is a limited partnership operating in the midstream portion of the natural gas and natural gas liquids industry, providing transportation and storage services for its customers. Through its subsidiaries, the company owns and operates more than 14,000 miles of interconnected natural gas and liquids pipelines throughout the central and eastern United States.

The company’s natural gas field agents were used to manually collecting data, filling in paper forms to record daily work and then storing those paper forms in field office shelves. This process was unreliable at best and a potential liability at worst, as any extreme weather conditions would result in a high chance of data loss.
With current operations data and business processes completed manually and in silos, the company lacked visibility into operations data at the enterprise level. Collaboration was difficult and the records retrieval process was cumbersome and unreliable.

Complex integration solutions between customer UI, employee workbenches, and the current legacy policy and claims admin systems further complicated things. And a dependency on custom coding from IT for process improvements or simple changes slowed innovation.

The Solution

In response to this challenge, BPP implemented an integrated case management application in Pega. This application allows field agents to enter all necessary forms electronically, eliminating the need to complete and file paper forms.

The Pega Offline Mobile App enables agents to capture crucial data and images while offline in remote field areas. The app then automatically synchs all newly collected information when the agent returns online.

Once the electronic form is fully completed and approved, the system automatically generates a PDF that is pushed to a content management system Microsoft SharePoint for future auditing and archival purposes. BPP is also pushing the completed form data elements to its data lake for reporting purposes through a BIX integration.

The Results

With its new solution in Pega, BPP has:

• Delivered an Offline Mobile App in under six months
• Eliminated manual paper forms and follow-ups
• Implemented an electronic form process that is 90% faster than its previous paper-based process
• Delivered 100% data protection by securing field operations data electronically and eliminating manual document folders in office locations
• Improved data visibility and enabled compliance teams with easy monitoring and decisioning
• Rolled out 17 forms, with hundreds more planned for the future