How Automated Workflows Killed the “Who Writes the Report?” Problem at Silvi

When an incident crosses plant lines at a 30-site operation, manual accountability breaks down fast. Here’s how Colby Ankeny’s team made it automatic — and what that unlocked downstream.

Picture this: two Silvi Materials employees from different plants are at a third job site when an incident happens. A plant manager from Plant A responds first. But the injured worker belongs to Plant B. The question that follows — who writes the incident report? — used to turn into a days-long negotiation.

Multiply that across 30-plus sites, a workforce of around 1,000 people, and a safety team of four, and you start to see the math. Every incident that required manual coordination was an incident that could sit, get forgotten, or land in the wrong hands. Not because anyone was careless. Because the system made accountability something that had to be negotiated, every single time.

Colby Ankeny, Director of HSE at Silvi Materials, has been using Novara Flex for three years. He’ll tell you the workflow system was one of the main reasons he chose it. And the way it handles exactly that kind of scenario — cross-site, multi-plant, ambiguous ownership — is a good place to start.

When Two Plants Share One Incident

Before Novara Flex, Silvi relied on paper forms and custom workarounds inside their HRIS. It wasn’t just slow — it was structurally unprepared for a distributed operation.

When a supervisor finished managing an incident in the field — getting the employee to a drug test, dealing with whatever was backing up at the plant, keeping operations running — they’d eventually have to sit down and try to reconstruct a report. Sometimes that happened same day. Often, it didn’t.

The cross-plant scenario made this worse. If the supervisor who responded wasn’t the direct supervisor of the employee involved, no one had clear ownership. Was it the responder’s job to file? Was it the employee’s home plant manager? What if two Silvi employees from different plants were both involved in the same event?

“There was a lot of, like, process issues that we had,” Colby says. “It just became a whole lot of extra things.”

Why Manual Routing Fails Every Time

The problem isn’t that people didn’t care about getting reports done. The problem is that manual routing places the administrative burden of accountability directly on frontline supervisors — at the exact moment they’re most distracted.

A supervisor managing an active incident is not in the right headspace to also be determining: Is this a first report or a full investigation? Who’s the right person in safety leadership to notify? Does this trigger OSHA recordkeeping? Who in claims needs to know?

If any of those questions require a phone call or a judgment call, you’ve introduced delay. And delay in incident documentation doesn’t just slow down the paperwork. It degrades root cause analysis, muddies corrective actions, and weakens your ability to prevent the next event.

What Colby needed was a system that answered all of those questions automatically — without requiring the supervisor to know the answer in the moment.

Tiered Workflows: How Novara Flex Decides What Happens Next

Colby built Silvi’s incident workflow around a single anchor: the first report of incident form. Everything branches from there.

The form is filed on a phone, at the scene. What the supervisor selects on that form determines everything that happens next — which follow-on form gets triggered, who it gets assigned to, and how it escalates through the organization. The supervisor doesn’t have to make any of those decisions. The system makes them.

The critical detail in step two is the auto-assignment logic. The report goes to the supervisor of the employee involved, based on that employee’s record in the system — not to whoever happened to be standing closest when it happened. That’s what resolves the cross-plant problem: the system knows who belongs to whom. Geography becomes irrelevant.

From First Report to Full Investigation — Automatically

The anomaly routing is worth pausing on. When something outside the standard incident categories gets flagged — Colby calls these “other” selections — it skips every middle tier and lands directly with him. Not the plant manager. Not the regional manager. The director.

“It goes around everybody and comes straight to me,” he says. “So I can see it — because obviously it’s an anomaly.”

This is the kind of escalation logic that paper systems and spreadsheets simply can’t replicate. Anomalies, by definition, are things that don’t fit the standard flow. Manual systems handle them poorly because the person filing the report has to recognize the anomaly and escalate it themselves — which requires judgment, awareness of the right chain of command, and the willingness to go up the ladder. Automated systems route it up by design.

For a lean safety team managing 1,000 employees across dozens of sites, that visibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s how Colby stays ahead of the incidents that could become serious if they weren’t caught early.

What Your Incident Workflow Should Look Like

Colby uses Novara Flex workflows beyond just incidents — audits, review processes, cross-departmental documentation all run through the same engine. But the incident workflow is where the design philosophy is easiest to see.

A well-built incident workflow does five things:

Silvi’s workflows are, in Colby’s words, “actually pretty complicated.” But from the supervisor’s perspective, they’re simple: fill out the form, and the system takes it from there. That gap — between back-end complexity and front-end simplicity — is where the time savings actually live.

“It really did simplify a lot of the things that they had to do,” he says of his supervisors. “And so they were really good about it.”

That buy-in matters more than most EHS leaders expect. Automated workflows remove the friction of reporting, which means people actually complete them — in the moment, at the scene, before the details blur. And more complete reports, filed faster, make every downstream decision better: investigation quality, corrective action targeting, and the data you use to allocate your team’s time.

The “who writes the report?” argument doesn’t happen at Silvi anymore. Not because the multi-plant complexity went away, but because the answer is already built into the system.

When incident accountability runs itself, your team stops managing process and starts managing safety — request a demo to see how Novara Flex workflows work in practice.