Safety across 25 sites, without the paperwork
How Scott Construction — the biggest builder on the top of the South Island, replaced spreadsheets and paper forms with one connected platform, and turned reporting into a habit its crews actually keep.
A growing company outrunning its paperwork
As Scott Construction grew, the old ways of tracking people and safety stopped keeping up. Attendance ran on paper sheets and hand-built spreadsheets — every new starter meant reprinting the lot. For a team responsible for around 100 people across dozens of sites, it had become unsustainable.
“I was banging on for years — I can’t keep doing this. Managing anywhere from 80 to 100 people, all paper-based, it’s just administratively taxing.”
There was a second, very human trigger: Managing Director Justin wanted to walk onto any site and greet his people by name — natural when the company was smaller, but harder as new faces appeared on sites he hadn’t visited. The workaround was spreadsheets with photos, printed by site — accurate for a day, out of date the next. The team needed one system to confirm who was on site, handle inductions and competencies, and make incident reporting quick enough that crews would actually do it.
Low risk to start, everything in one place
Scott Construction weighed up several health and safety platforms. Some were priced high enough that trialling them was a real financial risk. SiteConnect stood out on three fronts:
“The pricing point was kind of the trigger — at this price it’s worth trialling. Four, five years later, we’re still here.”
Reporting that runs across every site
Today, SiteConnect runs across every Scott Construction site from Nelson down to Queenstown. These figures come from a single recent month — the team’s biggest month for reporting to date.
“Increase your safety observations and I’ll nearly guarantee your incidents and near misses trend the opposite direction. The more we log up front, the less goes wrong on site.”
Four ways it shows up on site
A habit, not a chore
On paper, an incident report was a fillable PDF that took real time to complete, and if no one read the folder it landed in, it could sit unseen for weeks. Now a crew member logs a near miss in under two minutes: photo, note, done. Every manager on that site is notified at the same moment.
Video
“If it’s not easy to report, they won’t report it. A hundred percent.”Jordan · H&S Manager
More observations, fewer incidents
The team sees a consistent pattern: as proactive safety observations rise, near misses and serious incidents trend the other way. Logging a hazard the moment it’s spotted across 25 sites lets them catch a recurring issue as a trend and change the process before it becomes an injury.
Video
“Increase your safety observations and I’ll nearly guarantee your incidents and near misses trend the opposite direction.”Jordan · H&S Manager
They look after themselves
Training and staff development tracks certifications — EWP, first aid, harness, power-tool tickets — with automated reminders 28 and 14 days before anything expires, to the office and the individual. What used to live in someone’s memory now runs quietly in the background.
Video
“Scan the certificate and forget about it for two or three years. Who’s going to remember whose competency is due in ten years’ time?”Steve · Training & Staff Development Manager
Know who’s on site, in real time
The problem that started it all is solved day to day. If someone asks which site a worker is on, the team pulls it up in seconds. Walk onto a site expecting five plumbers and see only three signed in? That’s a conversation they can have on the spot — not a discovery made weeks later.
Video
“We’ll see five plumbers on site and only three listed. Let’s go and have a talk to the plumbers.”Steve · Training & Staff Development Manager
In the crew’s own words
“If it’s not easy to report, they won’t report it. A hundred percent — and now it takes under two minutes.”
“In two and a half years I’ve not yet found anyone I can’t get signed into a site. The support from Teresa makes it very easy.”
“You’re a local company, in New Zealand. We’re not talking to someone overseas — and you’re responsive.”
Local, responsive, and still growing with them
Scott Construction is candid that no off-the-shelf system does absolutely everything a business might want — and that’s exactly why the relationship matters. Being able to pick up the phone to a New Zealand team that responds, and having a say in how the product evolves, is a big part of why they’ve stayed.
The team is now expanding its use of SiteConnect further, including toolbox talks led by crew on site and reviewed by leadership — another way safety stays visible and shared rather than filed away.
See what SiteConnect could do for your sites
Join construction companies across New Zealand, Australia and the UK running safety in one place.
