“I tell people all the time how great Flex is across the industry; it’s been a great, affordable, and scalable option.”
Client Profile
First Call Mechanical’s Journey from Manual to Automated Safety-First Practices
First Call Mechanical is a rapidly growing mechanical services company operating across 16 states with 25 locations. With just a two-person safety team supporting 862 employees and two years of impressive growth, the company needed a scalable, centralized solution to support its expanding workforce and reinforce its safety-first culture. “We’re a safety-first culture, and across all of our employees last year, we had only 12 incidents, and only one of them was major, and the rest were minor. We have a very safety-first mindset, but we knew there had to be a centralized, organized way to report things to the safety team and make it more proactive,” shares Danielle Reinhardt, Safety Administration.Challenges
Scaling Safety in a Growing Organization
As First Call Mechanical grew from 600 to 862 employees, its safety processes were no longer sustainable. Safety reporting and documentation lived in spreadsheets, binders, email threads, and often in Danielle’s head. Data capture gaps made it difficult to track incidents, near misses, and training compliance consistently across 25 locations. Field employees had to navigate multiple legacy systems (SkillMo and GotSafety) or manually contact the safety team to report incidents. “We had a very complex Excel situation and binders, but the system itself was larger than something that could no longer be manual, plus there was a gap in data capture. So we turned to Novara Flex,” shares Danielle. Although the company maintained a strong safety record with only 12 incidents last year, (and only one of those being a one major incident), leadership knew they needed a centralized, automated system to move from reactive reporting to a more proactive safety culture. Ideally, the goal was also to gain more than just a safety tool; long-term, they envisioned a one-stop shop for both safety and risk management. “We were very interested in pivoting to a proactive safety culture; incidents do happen, but we can plan ahead of them to minimize risk. Specifically, we wanted to be better at documenting and catching near misses by giving our team resources that were readily accessible in one place and making the way the safety team was notified about incidents faster and smoother,” shared Danielle.Solutions
Making Safety Reporting Accessible to Everyone
First Call Mechanical selected Noravera Flex after evaluating multiple platforms, ultimately choosing it for its centralized workflows and automation capabilities. Today, the team leverages Flex’s training library for refresher courses, monthly safety topics, and retrospective incident reviews, ensuring consistent education across all locations. They rely heavily on the Incidents tool and associated automated workflows to streamline reporting and follow-up. To drive adoption, Danielle and her safety team launched a comprehensive internal campaign to build buy-in across both field and corporate employees, resulting in strong engagement and sustained platform usage. “Since moving to Flex, we’ve probably captured 30 forms (that’s one form a day since implementation), and we’re looking for other resources and libraries that we can pull from for our safety training from Flex as well,” shares Danielle.“Flex made us more approachable, accessible, and organized. It allows our small safety team to support hundreds of employees across multiple states.”
They implemented Flex in December and prioritized:
Full Employee Buy-In on Incident Intake & Automated Workflows
With Flex, QR codes were deployed in every company vehicle and technician glovebox, allowing field employees to instantly submit incident reports via mobile. Submissions trigger automated notifications to safety, team leaders, and HR, dramatically improving timeliness and accuracy. “That’s what really sold us on Flex, the ease of access. And participation rate-wise, we have 85% of all employees registered as users in Flex. For context, we had nowhere near that level of engagement with our prior platform. They use it on mobile and desktop, and we can actually tie it to utilization metrics to see how many employees are signed up and who isn’t,” shares Danielle.Safety & Compliance Training
Flex now powers their safety and compliance training program, including: Additionally, Flex automation helped bring their internal HR-sponsored development training program that they’d been working on since 2024, dubbed ‘Tradepath,’ to life by tying safety training directly to field roles and advancement paths depending on what field the employee was coming from for everything from HVAC to plumbing and refrigeration.Multi-System Integration
The team built an API between their HRIS system and Flex, eliminating manual employee uploads and ensuring real-time synchronization of employee records, managers, and user counts. They are now exploring additional integrations with their ERP to expand operational use cases.“Flex finally gave us the automated capability that we didn’t have prior to really bringing it to life and made it a successful rollout company- wide.”
