Standardizing Safety Across 6.4GW of Data Center Projects

Holder Construction delivers large-scale data center projects - backed by experience delivering over 6.4GW across the U.S. - where multiple trade partners, compressed timelines, and high-risk activities converge. The challenge wasn’t a lack of safety processes, but instead ensuring consistency, visibility, and control across every layer of the job.

By leveraging HammerTech, Holder has moved from fragmented workflows and disconnected documentation to a centralized, data-driven approach that improves planning, strengthens oversight, and enables continuous improvement across projects.

As a construction manager, Holder’s role is not to perform the work, but align trade partners, expectations, and safety processes across complex, fast‑moving sites.

The priority isn’t managing paperwork on these projects. It’s identifying high‑risk activities early, planning the work deliberately, and making sure crews are aligned before that work starts.

THE PROBLEM -

Managing high-risk work across multiple stakeholders

Data center construction brings together dense, high-energy environments with a wide range of trade partners working simultaneously.

Unlike self‑perform contractors, Holder operates primarily as a construction manager, responsible for coordinating, aligning, and verifying safety execution across multiple independent trade partners.

Much of this work involves inherently high‑risk activities: energization, overhead work, material handling, confined spaces, and simultaneous operations. Without strong pre‑task planning and shared visibility, risk can compound quickly across multiple crews.

This creates a fundamental challenge: ensuring alignment across every trade partner, every activity, every client expectation.

The safety challenge isn't just risk volume. It's the speed at which conditions change.

"Most data center projects are construction management. You’re managing trade partners on the job, so one of the most significant challenges is establishing a source of truth."

Each client also brings their own requirements, standards, and reporting expectations. What works on one project cannot simply be copied to another

Before digital tools were widely adopted, processes like orientations, documentation, and tracking were often handled through spreadsheets, paper forms, or disconnected systems.

The result was that safety data existed, but it was difficult to access, standardize, or use to drive better decisions.  

THE SOLUTION -

One connected safety workflow: from pre-planning to execution

Holder implemented HammerTech as a centralized platform to manage safety across the full project lifecycle, from preconstruction planning through active site operations.

Rather than relying on fragmented tools, HammerTech enables Holder to connect critical workflows in one system.

High‑risk activity verification confirms that pre‑task planning, sequencing, and controls are in place before work proceeds.

By bringing all stakeholders, from internal teams to trade partners and clients, into a single platform, Holder created a shared system of record for safety planning, review, and field verification.

Safety programs,  JHAs, and high‑risk activities are submitted, reviewed, and aligned in HammerTech before work begins. This pre‑task planning step helps ensure hazards are identified, controls are understood, and expectations are clear before crews mobilize.

With every layer of the workflow connected from planning to execution, Holder now has real-time visibility into site activity and risk. That visibility is what turns safety data into something that the team can actually use, and not just capture.

WHY HAMMERTECH -

Turning connected workflows into usable, actionable data

For Holder, the value of HammerTech goes beyond digitizing safety processes for Holder. It gives them a way to use their data to drive better decisions.

With a centralized view across projects, teams can (1) identify trends, (2) prioritize risk, and (3) take a more proactive approach to safety.

Instead of relying on anecdotal observations, the contractor can now review consistent data across projects and focus attention where risk shows up most often.

THE RESULTS -

From disconnected processes to data-driven safety management

The impact of implementing HammerTech is evident across both day-to-day operations and long-term performance improvement.

These changes support Holder’s role in aligning expectations and verifying readiness, while trade partners continue to own the execution of their work. These improvements are driven upstream by better pre‑task planning, clearer alignment on high‑risk work, and more consistent engagement before activities begin.

Holder now tracks everything from observations and near misses to recordable incidents, enabling a more comprehensive view of safety performance.

This data is used not just at the project level, but across the enterprise to identify recurring issues and improve programs.

"Our lockout-tagout program is an example of how we are using HammerTech to track trends or issues across the entire enterprise, not just one project. We can see where potential trends are and if there are things we need to correct.”

COMPOUNDING VALUE -

Using data to improve the next project

Data center construction is highly repeatable, with similar designs, similar workflows, and similar risk profiles across different locations.

Holder is leveraging this repeatability by using historical safety data to inform future projects. By analyzing past incidents, observations, and work hours, teams identify recurring risk patterns, strengthen pre‑task planning for high‑risk activities, and refine controls before work begins.

"When we start up another project in a different city that follows the exact same design, I can go through our whole project history in HammerTech, from observations and work hours, to injuries and incidents, to identify any notable trends or correlation."

This creates a feedback loop where every project contributes to safer, more efficient execution on the next.