Moving Dirt, Not Paper: How Nox Group Is Pushing Field Safety Forward

There’s nothing easy about moving dirt. 

For Nox Group, civil and infrastructure is a unique beast that’s next to impossible to tame. Teams are digging 40 feet down, forming and pouring massive concrete basins, navigating existing underground utilities, and then climbing back up to finish the job.  

Add heavy equipment, electrical work, changing field teams and multiple projects, and the hazards are no joke and never-ending. 

Scott Mims, Vice President of Health, Safety, and Environmental (HSE) at Nox Group, knows this firsthand. Civil and infrastructure work (what Scott terms “the dirt world”) is high-risk with a razor-thin margin for error. Safety managers and superintendents often resort to jotting down observations on paper, then piecemeal their notes together later. Scott reflects, “We’d still be spending the first 45 minutes of every day writing something down on a sheet of paper.” 

That’s why Nox Group’s move to HammerTech isn’t really a story about replacing paper with software. It’s about giving crews a tool they actually want to use, making safety conversations more useful, and transforming what happens on the site every day into information that can help make the next job safer.

THE CHALLENGES

Safety was being pieced together

Nox Group oversees several operating companies, including RMCI (general contracting), Corbins (electrical contracting), among others. When Scott joined Nox Group in 2023, many safety processes within RMCI were still heavily dependent on pen and paper. The team had permits, forms, and an internal system adapted to handle some safety processes, but the system was primarily built for HR.

"We’d just been piecemealing it out because that’s what you do in the dirt world.”

But piecemealing safety together created a bigger problem than paperwork.

Every morning, crews hold a power-up meeting to talk through the day’s work, the hazards ahead, and how they’re going to control them. These conversations mattered and capturing them on paper could take 30 minutes or more.

“The Pre-Task Plans (PTPs)...when they write them out, they become very mundane. It is the same thing time and time again. It is the same hazards.”

Slips, trips, and falls. Pinch points. Back strains. Day after day, the same hazards and the same generic controls.

“Watch your step, be careful where you put your hands and don’t pick up anything heavy. That’s not really mitigation.”

For Scott, safety documentation was getting done, but that didn’t necessarily mean that better safety conversations were happening.

“I know those are the hazards that are on any PTP, but I don’t know what’s causing them.”

THE SOLUTION

It had to work for the field

Nox Group had already tested other safety technology before HammerTech. It didn’t stick.

Then a trade partner introduced Scott and his team to HammerTech. They saw it working in the field and decided to put it through the same test, with the same crews that had tried other platforms.

Their reaction was different.

“They said, ‘We don’t ever want to go back to anything else,’” recalls Scott. “‘This is what we want to do. This makes it easy.”

And for Scott, this was the only verdict that mattered.

The AI-powered PTP Meeting Capture feature in HammerTech Intelligence addressed one of Scott’s frustrations right of the bat.

HammerTech gave crews a way to spend more time on the safety conversation and less time documenting it. Instead of relying on someone to write down every detail, crews could keep their heads up, listen, and focus on the discussion while HammerTech helped capture a more thorough record for safety teams to review later.

In Scott’s words, there was no longer the same need to find “the neatest-writing person in the room” to be the stenographer.

Nox Group’s initial rollout has focused on PTPs, and observations, with JHAs also moving into HammerTech. Its practical starting point was to take the safety processes crews use in the field every day and make them easier to complete without losing the detail that makes them useful.

Next up is one of the biggest realities of civil work: permitting.

Nox Group is working with the HammerTech team to develop its permitting workflows around the way its crews truly work. When it comes to excavation, Scott doesn’t leave much room for interpretation: “If you scrape a bucket on my sites, you have to have a permit.”

Those permits must be comprehensive. Drawings, signatures, redlines, and supporting information all must be correct.

The goal is to bring that rigor into the same place as the rest of the safety record, making critical information easier to capture and retrieve, instead of having teams piece it together later or go hunting for a sheet of paper that isn’t “smudged to death.”

WHY HAMMERTECH

Know before you go

With 10 to 12 projects running at any given time, Scott can’t be everywhere. Nor can he sit in on every morning toolbox talk, or power-up meeting.

But HammerTech offers Scott something particularly valuable from where he sits: visibility. It’s a window into the job before his boots hit the ground. Instead of having to visit each site, Scott can pull up the information before walking an area and understand who’s there and what they’re doing.

As Nox Group adds more observations and incident data, Scott sees HammerTech becoming a real-time health check across his jobs. Before he steps onto a site, he can see who’s there, what work is underway, and where potential safety issues may need attention.

Instead of safety leadership showing up and asking, “What do you need from us?” Now they can arrive informed and confidently asserting, “Here’s what we saw. What’s your plan?” Or, in Scott’s words, they can bring real value instead of “wandering around a job site and hoping there’s a free lunch.”

THE RESULTS

Already a "gamechanger"

Nox Group has started its rollout of HammerTech on a Southwestern infrastructure project. As they refine their workflows, they’ll apply their learnings to future rollouts to their 2,000 employees.

It’s early days, but some of the changes are already clear:

More room for the work that matters.

There’s another result that won’t necessarily show up on a dashboard: morale.

Scott knows what he’s asking of the people in the field. Construction is hard work. If someone is heading into ten hours of physical labor, the last thing they need is unnecessary writing getting between them and the work ahead.

Take some of that friction away so crews can keep their heads up and put more of their attention where Scott wants it, which is on the conversation, the hazard, and how they’re going to do the job safely. According to Scott, both morale and complaints about paperwork are already moving in the right direction, “We don’t lose time on unnecessary writing… HammerTech allows us to provide additional, more information than they’ve ever gotten in a far quicker format than they’ve ever gotten it.”

 Cover image courtesy of Nox Group.