From Spreadsheets to SmartSafety: PT&TG Gains 40% More Reporting and Full Remote Visibility with Novara

Client Profile

Eric Gardner serves as VP of Risk Management at Pittsburg Tank & Tower Group, which operates tank and communication tower divisions with fabrication shops and nearly 60 internal crews working coast-to-coast and in over 50 countries. For over a hundred years, PT&TG handled groundwater storage tanks, elevated storage tanks, and various communication towers, utilizing both internal crews and multiple levels of subcontractors for different project components.

Challenges

Disconnected Systems Limited Visibility and Accountability

“Most common injuries are lacerations despite high-risk activities, including work at heights, confined spaces, and hot work. We do some of the highest risk activities possible, and there’s a lot of risk exposure within this industry. But luckily, the majority are low-level injuries,” shared Eric. In a high risk industry with many remote field locations, PT&TG was relying on a siloed system of multiple excel spreadsheets with no transparency or visibility into their incident management process. And in an industry where risk is expected, that lack of visibility is a slippery slope. They previously had a partnership with a different software program where they had to go to multiple different platforms to access a variety of resources across contractors, projects, incident management, and training. The siloed software and lack of visibility required a lot of manual effort and resulted in missing data and broken systems. In addition to the need for a better system for incident management, PT&TG’s field teammates were also struggling with a lack of flexible cloud options for tracking incidents when in remote locations without wifi.

“Our employees that use Novara do find that offline capability is important. I would wager about 50% of our employees are on the road all the time, and we needed that offline capability cause they don’t always have access to wifi so they could still track all that data, We really appreciate Novara’s cloud based features, that’s huge for us.”

Solutions

“We looked at several different companies and did a sandbox trial and rating system before settling on Novara. EHS, Ecoonline, Safety 101, Verafore were a few compared against Novara. Novara ended up being the right one. It’s really grown our safety culture,” shares Eric. PT&TG evaluated 5-6 alternatives, before selecting Novara for its comprehensive module integration and customization capabilities. Novara launched in January 2025 to field PT&TG’s field employees, providing a level of visibility and clean data across the board so that PT&TG can now easily understand what the corrective actions are, how to capture it, and how many incidents they’re seeing a day. Eric’s teams use Novara checklists for fire extinguishers inspections, lighter inspections, equipment use, daily activities, and more. He notes they continue to uncover greater capabilities and operational excellence all through Novara with one streamlined process.

“In our first year rolling out Novara, we’ve achieved 40% more reporting than last year, which is a big win since we’ve asked our teams to provide more detailed information now that we have an effective system to capture it. With this increased visibility, we can make smarter, data-driven decisions about where risk truly exists. As reporting goes up, we’re able to drive more meaningful behavior change — it’s exponential.”

Additionally, Novara’s contractor management module was added in June of 2025, providing even better visibility for project managers to find vetted subcontractors and automated tracking of certificate renewals. “Novara provides everything right away, tracks renewal for us, and takes the heavy lift off our actual people to handle the administrative side of our contractors. The other great thing about the subcontractor management is there’s not a lot of extra costs added on to it, it’s been helpful for us,” shares Eric.

Results

A More Connected, Customizable Safety Program

In the end, Novara’s key differentiators included the ability to customize training content and forms, integration between incident management and corrective actions, and the company’s responsiveness to customer feedback. With Novara, PT&T experienced the following benefits:

• Better Data Capture: Novara’s enhanced data collection enables more informed decision-making about risk patterns and allows for targeted hazard recognition and behavior modification initiatives.
• Greater Programmatic Visibility
• Enhanced integration: between systems, priorities and modules (i.e. sub contractor management, their LMS, incident management modules)
• Better Follow Through on Incident Management: with Novara, incident management is tied to corrective action and re-training so that it’s tracked from end-to-end
• Increased Customizability: The customizability of the forms checklist, docs, and training that Novara offered allowed for personalization over canned, stocked training. PT&TG was able to add in their own company nomenclature, logos, etc. to make it theirs.
• User Friendly & Offline Uploading Capability in a Remote Field