Building Workflows and Deploying Safety Data with Colby Ankeney and  Arlo Amos

Welcome to The Safety Meeting by Novara. If you caught our last episode of the Safety Meeting, you heard Colby Ankeney from Silvi Materials talk about what it takes to speak the language of safety leadership: making a business case, proving ROI, and treating safety as a leg of the business rather than a cost center. Today, we’re going into that same engine room. I sat down with Colby again, this time alongside Arlo Amos, the Novara solutions engineer who built the program alongside him, to get into the how. How do you collect clean data across 40 high-risk sites? How do you build forms that people will actually use? How do you turn data into KPIs that your executives truly care about? And how do you know when your numbers are telling you the truth? Let’s get into it.

Colby, you came in and realized you were essentially flying blind.

Colby Ankeney:

Yeah, so we basically had really, really archaic processes. We were not really optimizing. But really, more than anything, we really hadn’t decided what kind of data we wanted to keep. So we had all these Excel sheets and we were tracking tire accidents here and backing accidents here and all these things, but you really couldn’t see what was happening, and you really couldn’t pinpoint hotspots, and you really couldn’t give good information.

So, you couldn’t pinpoint the hotspots because the data you had wasn’t set up to show them. And before you could fix that, you had to figure out what data you actually wanted in the first place. Colby, you described it as a choose your own adventure. What did that actually look like in practice?

Colby Ankeney:

So, I sat down and I said what things would I have a field safety person do? What kinds of actions? Call it unprompted safety audits, walks, a Gemba walk type stuff. You have your Kaizen events, you have employee one-on-one sessions, RCAs, right? There’s all these types of things that I knew that I would want a field person to do. So when I did that, I brought that same list into forms. I would literally bring an Excel sheet and say, “these are all the things I need this form to do, I need you to help me make the gates.”

Everything I do inside of Flex is really like a choose your own adventure is how I use it; it maximizes our time. We don’t fill out fields that we don’t need for the function that we’re trying to do in the moment. And then everything can be sorted out so I can justify and show time and how many job sites we go to. For me, it’s really coming in with knowing what kinds of things you want in a form, or maybe all the types of forms that you would want, and then consolidating what you can and using the conditional fields to choose your own adventure.

And it really makes it simple because we’re in Flex every day, and I’ll be honest with you, I mean, we don’t have a tremendous amount of forms. And we use forms in HR, we use forms for our operation stuff, as well as all my risk and compliance things, and combined, I bet we have less than 30 forms.

Less than 30 forms across the entire company: HR, operations, risk, and compliance. That discipline upfront is clearly a big part of why people actually use them. So, now you have that data coming in cleanly. The next challenge is making sure that it’s showing what leadership needs to see and that they’re actually paying attention to it. How did you figure out what KPIs to build?

Colby Ankeney:

Yeah, so I mean there’s basic things that all companies want to have. You need to understand your DART rates, for instance. You have to track your OSHA compliance stuff. I need to turn in our at-fault accidents, and my ownership is really, really keen on our at-fault accidents. It’s a metric that they love, it’s a metric that they directly correlate to how safe we are being, the decisions our employees are making, and how well we’re training and putting guys in the right positions. So like at-fault accidents is something that I’ve just kind of created for us because it scratches an itch for my leadership team. One of my favorite sayings that I’d heard from a colleague of mine was, “what interests your boss should fascinate you,” and I love that saying, I really do. And, you know, for us that’s our at-fault accidents rates.

Wow, okay. “What interests your boss should fascinate you.” That’s a line that I want to come back to later. But first, you’ve built these KPIs, leadership is now paying attention, and then something interesting happens: the numbers start going up before they go down. I think that’s something important to touch upon. It’s something that not a lot of people think about when they start building real reporting and sometimes it can trip them up, that at first, the numbers look worse. More incidents get logged, leadership starts to panic. How do you navigate that?

Colby Ankeney:

Yeah, so I really think the key for me is really true reporting. What we turn in really happens. We report everything and so reporting, you know, goes through the roof. That was always the intention for me. I knew that there was a lot of stuff out there that we just didn’t know about, so I knew that if we were making decisions on hotspots, they would be half-cocked. And so I really set out to just kind of figure out what actually was happening out there, and my first year here was just that. I spent almost every day out in the field learning the guys, the plants, the managers, kind of the dynamics within each group. You know, we have tons and tons and tons of locations, so everywhere kind of has their own DNA, so to speak.

You said something that I think is key. You spent your first year out in the field learning the people and the plants before you tried to fix anything. That groundwork is clearly a big part of why people trust that system once you actually implement it. Arlo, let’s talk about the design side of that because the form itself has a lot to do with whether people actually give you honest data. Good data quality starts with forms that are actually designed for the people that are going to be filling them out. What does that look like in practice?

Arlo Amos:

We build forms out very strategically, like you mentioned earlier. We didn’t want to go for quantity, we wanted to go for quality. And in addition to that, not only do we want to get that good quality information, but we also want there to be timely action on that information, right? And so Silvi in particular, you optimized those workflows, you didn’t throw any random stuff in those forms that didn’t really add value to the data you were pulling out of it. And you enabled your employees who do want to give you this information, and that’s really where, you know, giving them that mobile device and those automated workflows really allowed you to gather that data.

Colby, I want to stay on that quality question for a second because even with a well-designed form, there’s always the risk that people are just kind of going through the motions. A question that I’ve heard a lot of safety managers have is how do I know my team isn’t just ticking boxes? How do I verify that what’s coming in actually reflects what’s happening out there?

Colby Ankeney:

That’s a fantastic question. So inside of my forms, when I’m building anything, I’m really looking at what data do I want. And then we have really optimized follow-ups and photos inside of our job site inspections, and then ultimately guys aren’t just taking a picture of a truck and that’s it. It’s, “hey, you know, really what’s the job site look like?” A wide pan vision, you know, what’s access look like, all these things. But I also will tell you I steer away from quote-unquote checkbox type inspections. I think that people need to go in with fresh eyes—to go in with the intent to think rather than, “I need to go down this list.” So I really do also limit those things. But we’re making sure we’re getting the right data by interfacing with our sales group, integrating with our customers, integrating with our ops teams as well, so it’s really kind of multifaceted. That’s a really good question though.

Fresh eyes instead of checklists, photos, and cross-referencing with ops and sales. It’s a multifaceted answer which makes sense given how multifaceted your platform is. Arlo, let’s zoom out for a second. For someone who’s listening to this and wants to build something like what Colby has but maybe feels like they’re not technical enough to get started, what does a ramp-up like that actually look like when you’re intimidated by that technical stuff?

Arlo Amos:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think a little bit of background on the platform can be helpful with this. So the Novara Flex platform was originally built by a safety manager within the industry. He was actually evaluating safety management systems, and he was having a really hard time finding one that could fit exactly what he needed but also adapt as quickly as his team needed it to. So with that, he ended up deciding to go out and find a developer and build one of his own.

Really, one of the key pieces was they really focused on two things. One, it needed to be mobile-friendly because he was working in the oil and gas industry and he needed roughnecks out in the field to be able to utilize it with, you know, gloves on. It needed talk to text, you needed to be able to utilize the app one-handed, and it needed offline capabilities because they were out in these rural areas, right? So that was kind of one of their number one priorities when they built it. And the other one really was he needed to be able to hand it to a safety manager and have them do everything they needed to do on their own, right? No developers required, no IT teams required.

And so the system was really built out to be as user-friendly as possible so that you don’t have to be a technical person to come in and be able to use it. I can even speak to that myself. I did not have a technical background before I came to work for Novara and now I’m a subject matter expert on the platform, right? So it’s really easy to come in and learn. You don’t need to know any code, you don’t need to be a developer, you don’t really have to have very much technical knowledge at all to be able to come in, get it set up, and get it running.

Built by a safety manager for safety managers, and no coding required. Colby, you live that firsthand. I want to give you the last word on this practical side of getting started because I think the advice you gave about where to focus your energy upfront is something a lot of people skip. You said the single most important thing you did was spend time upfront understanding what you wanted your workflow to look like before you even touched the platform. For someone starting from scratch, what does that process actually look like?

Colby Ankeney:

If I had any advice, it would be spend the time and understand what you want your workflow to look like first, then worry about what’s going to be on the form later. And I think that helped me a lot. I took that approach and then we were, you know, I bet we, in all fairness when I started, I bet we had to delete two or three forms that I just said, “well, that was not good in what I want.” But honestly after that, it really, it really took off and we have had the same workflows for three years. Really, that work upfront really helped me with the forms.

Makes sense. Workflow first, form second. And I want to close out on something that you said earlier: “What interests your boss should fascinate you.” That mindset runs through everything we’ve talked about today, and I want to hear about how you’ve actually lived it. How do you stay aligned with what your executives care about as those priorities shift?

Colby Ankeney:

Well, I think it’s really easy. I think you ask them. You’ve got to find the things that matter a lot to you. You know, my ready mix director, he and I speak—sometimes it feels like daily—but he’ll come to me and say, “I really, really need this information.” And so it’s like, “listen, let’s make let’s make this a dashboard for you, let’s let’s figure out a way to track it.” He’ll come to me a year in advance to say, “next year I’d really like this to be a bonus goal. How can we get in front of this? How can I engage my people? How can we make sure the data is going to be honest?” There’s a lot of collaboration there, but ultimately it really is just the spirit of making things better rather than, you know, things aren’t working.

Colby, Arlo, this was a really valuable conversation. I think what’s going to stick with me is something that Colby said about forms: the tool is the easy part; the work is deciding what you want before you touch it. Workflow first, form second. And the results speak for themselves. Stay safe out there.