From Paper to 300% Adoption: How Utilitra Transformed Safety in Months, Not Years

Welcome to the Novara Game Changers Series. Each month, we’re spotlighting customers who are rewriting the rules of safety management—achieving results that challenge conventional wisdom about what’s possible with EHS technology. These are real stories from real safety professionals who refused to accept the status quo.

We’re kicking off with Utilitra, our winner of the Flex Rookie of the Year award. As a certified Woman-owned business specializing in engineering, technology, and construction for the utility sector, Utilitra faced a challenge familiar to many: a small safety department, diverse customer requirements, and field workers scattered across multiple job sites. The conventional playbook said modernizing safety would take years. Utilitra had other plans.

What they accomplished in less than a year? A 300% increase in good catch and near-miss reporting. A 200% improvement in field auditing. And perhaps most impressively, field workers who actually wanted to use the system.

Here’s how they did it.

The Starting Point: Paper, Excel, and a Growing Problem

Before KPA Flex, Utilitra’s safety processes looked like most in the construction industry: paper forms, Excel spreadsheets, and disjointed systems that didn’t talk to each other. Field audits happened on clipboards. Near-miss reports got filed—somewhere. Training records lived in binders. And getting a clear picture of safety performance across projects? That required manual data entry, follow-up calls, and a lot of patience.

For Jason Wernex, Utilitra’s Director of Safety, this wasn’t just an efficiency problem—it was a visibility problem. With workers spread across diverse utility sector projects, he needed real-time insight into what was happening in the field. He needed faster issue identification. And he needed a system that his team would actually use.

Why Speed Mattered: No Room for Multi-Year Implementations

Utilitra is a growing company, and they needed a safety solution that could scale with them. But beyond scalability, there was a practical reality: field workers have expectations.

Jason had been through this before. In previous roles at major organizations, he’d rolled out well-known safety tools. The pattern was usually the same: lengthy implementations, extensive training programs, ongoing resistance, and adoption that never quite reached critical mass.

This time needed to be different.

The Game-Changing Decision: The iPhone Principle

When evaluating safety software, Jason applied what we call the iPhone Principle: if the tool isn’t intuitive enough that workers can pick it up and start using it without extensive training, it’s not the right tool.

Utilitra selected KPA Flex specifically for its flexibility and what they believed would be an intuitive, positive end-user experience.

Fast Implementation Strategy: Starting with What’s Familiar

Here’s where Utilitra’s approach gets interesting. Instead of trying to deploy every feature at once, they started with forms that workers already knew—just in digital format. Auditing forms. Good catch and near-miss reporting. The same processes, the same workflows, but now on a mobile app instead of paper.

This wasn’t about limiting the technology. It was about building confidence and trust.

The implementation itself was collaborative. Jason worked with KPA’s implementation manager Jem Dyer, meeting regularly over several weeks to move legacy data into the system and set up proper foundations. The goal wasn’t just to get the technology running—it was to ensure the user experience would be positive from day one.

The Mobile App Advantage: Immediate Field Adoption

What happened next surprised even Jason.

He’d anticipated needing structured training sessions for the mobile app. He’d prepared a communication plan, sent out information about what was coming and why, and started planning formal training. But when they turned the system on and workers downloaded the app, something unexpected happened.

For the small percentage who needed a little more help, it wasn’t really training—it was more of a jump start. Once they saw how the functionality worked and recognized the patterns, that was all it took.

The mobile-first design made all the difference. But perhaps more importantly, workers started talking to each other.

That organic, peer-to-peer adoption—workers genuinely recommending the tool to each other—drove field acceptance in a way no training program ever could.

Results in Months, Not Years

Within their first year with KPA Flex, Utilitra achieved measurable results that typically take organizations much longer:

300% increase in good catch and near-miss reporting — and not just more reports, but more diversity in who was reporting. Workers who had never submitted a report before started participating.

200% improvement in field auditing — exceeding their goals and providing real-time visibility into safety conditions across projects.

Faster issue identification and resolution — problems that used to take days to surface now appeared immediately.

Training compliance at its highest level ever — with centralized, easy access for all workers.

A backlog of user-requested capabilities — When your field workers are asking for more functionality, you know adoption is real.

What Makes a Game Changer

Utilitra’s story reveals a principle that applies far beyond their organization: the right user experience drives rapid adoption, and rapid adoption drives results. It’s a simple formula, but one that most organizations get wrong.

When technology is truly intuitive, you don’t have to force people to use it. You don’t need elaborate change management programs or ongoing training sessions. Workers adopt it because it makes their lives easier. And when workers adopt technology willingly, the data flows, visibility improves, and safety outcomes follow.

The commitment to a tool can’t be forced. The quantitative metrics—300% here, 200% there—only tell part of the story. The real success is qualitative: field workers embracing technology, project managers finding operational uses beyond EHS, and a safety department that’s no longer chasing paperwork.

Next in the Game Changers Series: We’ll dive deeper into how Utilitra achieved remarkable acceptance across both office and field workers—and what that means for organizations struggling with technology adoption.