Colby Ankeny’s team at Silvi Materials was doing everything right — methodical, disciplined, by the book. They were also spending hundreds of hours on inspections that were producing almost no findings. The data told a different story. When Colby listened to it, incidents dropped 25%.
500 Inspections. 2 Findings. A Better Question.
When Colby became Director of HSE at Silvi Materials, he inherited a set of standard procedures — one of which was regular truck inspections. His field safety team would fan out, inspect vehicles across Silvi’s operations, log their findings, and move on. It looked productive. It felt productive. And for a long time, nobody questioned it.
Then Colby started pulling inspection data from Novara Flex.
“In 500 or 600 truck inspections, I think we found two or three out-of-service criteria,” Colby says. “Because our maintenance folks do a great job. They maintain our trucks well.”
The inspections weren’t finding problems because there weren’t problems to find. Silvi’s maintenance team was doing its job. But while his safety team was spending hours combing through truck cabs, job sites — where the bulk of Silvi’s incidents were actually occurring — weren’t getting that same attention.
The data made the choice obvious. Without it, the routine would have continued indefinitely.
Game Changers: Proof Points - Using Data to Build the Business Case for Safety with Silvi Materials
Colby Ankeny, Director of HSE of a construction materials company, will reveal how strategic use of data and analytics drove transformational results with limited resources
How Colby Used Novara Flex Data to Rethink His Resource Plan
The pivot Colby made wasn’t dramatic in its execution. He didn’t hire new people. He didn’t increase his budget. He had a four-person safety team managing roughly 1,000 employees, and that wasn’t changing. What changed was where those four people spent their time.
Moving field safety resources from truck inspections to job site presence meant more eyes on the activities that were actually generating incidents. Colby set a concrete metric: he wanted each of his field safety people to visit 200 different job sites over the course of the year. That specificity mattered — it gave his team a clear target and gave him a measurable way to connect activity to outcomes.
The connection held. Job site incidents dropped 25%.
This is the part of EHS leadership that rarely gets talked about — not just the decision to act on data, but the upstream discipline that made the data trustworthy in the first place. Colby is deliberate about what goes into his forms. “Data is only as good as the data that goes in,” he says. “You have to spend time up front to really decide what you want to collect. Once your form is honed down, the analytics piece is fast.”
When he talks about this, he’s describing something most EHS platforms don’t support well: the ability to customize what you capture, and then get answers from it quickly. That flexibility was a primary reason he chose Novara Flex over more rigid alternatives in the first place.
What a 25% Drop in Incidents Actually Tells You
A 25% reduction in job site incidents is a headline number. But Colby is careful about what it means — and how to communicate it up the chain.
He doesn’t just present injury rates. He builds the financial case around them, because getting buy-in for resources requires speaking the language of the people who control those resources. One of his tools is the days-away counter in Novara Flex’s OSHA case management module. It tracks lost days year over year, and Colby uses it to attach real dollar figures to safety improvements. If the average employee earns a certain hourly rate, he can take that rate, multiply it by hours lost, and show exactly what the reduction in severity means in financial terms — something that lands differently than a percentage point.
“Sometimes I think the ability to pull quick numbers like that, and attribute real financial figures to them, makes it more powerful,” he says. “It also really helps me get across what we’re trying to accomplish.”
The trajectory at Silvi tells that story. When Colby arrived, the company’s injury rates were double the national industry average. Today, they’re at half the average — a transformation that happened across multiple consecutive years, driven by data, focused resource allocation, and a culture where reporting is celebrated rather than suppressed.
The Reporting Paradox at Silvi
While injury rates at Silvi have fallen more than 75% since Colby joined, reported events have gone up 60%. That’s not a contradiction — it’s evidence that the safety program is working. More reporting means more visibility into near-misses and minor incidents. More visibility means earlier intervention. Earlier intervention means fewer serious injuries.
The Dashboard Habit Every Safety Leader Needs
Most safety leaders have data. What separates Colby from the average practitioner is that he has a plan for it.
“A lot of people just put a form out there,” he says. “They think they just need to collect data. But they don’t have a plan for the data.” The result is a system loaded with inputs that nobody ever synthesizes into decisions. The forms get filled out. The reports go into a folder. The routing stays the same.
Colby’s approach is the opposite. He treats the dashboard as a standing agenda item, not a one-time audit tool. Any time a number he’s tracking changes — at-fault incident rates, total reportable injuries, claims cost per man-hour — he has it accessible in two clicks. During our conversation with Colby, he mentioned that he was literally in the platform that morning reviewing a new incident.
YTD
avoided
incidents
That daily habit is what makes the resource pivot possible. You can’t decide where to move your people if you don’t know where the problems are concentrating. And you can’t prove the pivot worked without the baseline to compare against.
“The analytics portion is really useful,” Colby says, “because if you ask a company to spend money on resources, I think sometimes as a safety professional we don’t always know whether it’s working. Data lets you show: we made this decision, we put resources here, and here’s what we’re already seeing on the back end.”
For EHS leaders who feel like they’re perpetually making the case for headcount and budget, this is the core argument. Novara Flex doesn’t just record what happened. Used the way Colby uses it, it gives you the evidence to justify what comes next.
When Your EHS Software Talks to Your HRIS
One detail in Colby’s story that often gets overlooked: none of this works cleanly if your employee data isn’t current. Silvi has roughly 1,000 employees, and that number shifts constantly — new hires, separations, role changes, equipment reassignments. If the people in your safety system don’t match your actual workforce, your data has gaps before it even starts.
Silvi solved this through Novara Flex’s API integration with Kronos, their HR information system. When an employee is added or removed from Kronos, the change syncs automatically to Novara Flex. No manual imports. No weekly data cleanup. No lag between HR and safety records.
“I can’t manually import that,” Colby says. “People leave every week, new people come every week. The API means I don’t have to manually go in and move things around — and that’s huge.”
He’s also actively building a second integration with a fleet management system. The goal is the same: reduce administrative friction so his team can spend its time on safety, not data maintenance.
For a four-person team managing 1,000 employees across mining, concrete, bulk import, and rail operations, that kind of automation isn’t a convenience. It’s a prerequisite for the whole system to function.
The Takeaway: Data Doesn’t Just Record What Happened — It Tells You What to Do Next.
Over the past four weeks, we’ve followed Colby’s story from the ground up — from the first time a Silvi supervisor filed an incident report from their phone instead of waiting until they could find a computer, to the data-driven resource pivot that moved the needle on job site safety in a single year.
The through-line is mobile. Not as a feature, but as the condition that makes everything else possible. Real-time reporting only works when it’s genuinely accessible in the field. Dashboards only drive decisions when the data going in is clean, current, and built around the right questions. Automation only scales when your systems talk to each other.
Colby didn’t inherit a safety program that was already built. He built it — with a small team, a data-first mindset, and a platform that could flex to match the complexity of what Silvi actually does. That combination is why Silvi’s injury rates are now half the national average for their industry, and trending down.
Related Content
Explore more comprehensive articles, specialized guides, and insightful interviews selected, offering fresh insights, data-driven analysis, and expert perspectives.
