How Apex Energy Scaled EHS Reporting to 429 Employees in Under a Year

When Jason Conley joined Apex Energy as Director of Health and Safety in 2022, the company's entire safety program ran on paper. Incident reports, safety observations, management of change processes — all of it lived in binders, notebooks, and yellow folders of physical SDS sheets.

Today, every one of Apex's 429 employees can submit a safety observation from their phone in the field. The company tracks a proprietary injury metric through AI-powered analytics. And in 2026, they're expanding into audits, inspections, chemical management, training, and sustainability — all on a single platform.

Here's how they got there.

The Problem: Paper Processes at Scale

When Apex Energy had 150 employees, paper-based EHS worked well enough. But as the company grew — operations, construction, and development teams spread across the United States — the cracks started to show. Field personnel couldn't report incidents in real time. Safety observations went unrecorded because submitting them meant writing something down and waiting to get back to the office. Visibility into what was actually happening on-site was limited by the friction of the process itself.

Apex had previously used another EHS software vendor, but ran into a critical limitation: the platform couldn't be customized for how their teams in the field actually worked. So Conley did a full re-evaluation — evaluating 7 to 10 different platforms before landing on EHS Insight.

"It wasn't 'yes, we can do that,'" Conley said. "It was 'yes, we can do that — let me show you how.' That made all the difference."

Why Apex Chose EHS Insight

The decision came down to three things: configurability, customer support, and the quality of what was already built out of the box.

For incident reporting and safety observations, EHS Insight's standard templates were close enough to Apex's existing workflows that only minor tweaks were needed. For more complex requirements — like Apex's Remote Operations Control Center (ROCC), which logs planned and unplanned facility events in a format far more detailed than a standard incident report — EHS Insight's engineering team collaborated with Conley's team to build a custom module from the ground up.

That ROCC reporting capability, built specifically for Apex, is now available to any EHS Insight customer with similar operational needs.

The implementation process itself moved faster than expected. Apex signed a contract in late January and had their operations team reporting live in the system by May — just four months later. Construction teams went live in June, and the development group followed in August. By December, all 429 employees across the entire organization had access to submit safety observations and incident reports in real time.

From Zero to Company-Wide Reporting in Less Than a Year

One of the most significant outcomes wasn't just the rollout speed — it was what happened after.

When Apex expanded access to every employee in the company, including development staff who had never participated in formal safety observation programs before, reporting volume surged. Leadership initially wondered whether the uptick meant something was going wrong on-site.

It didn't. It meant people could finally report easily.

"There's always this slight uptick in reporting when you give people easier access," Conley explained. "It doesn't mean more unsafe things are happening. It means you have more transparency into what's already happening."

That visibility, Conley says, is the foundation of a stronger safety culture. Once reporting becomes effortless — from a phone, in the field, in real time — organizations start to see the data they always had, just never captured.

Using AI Copilot to Build Custom Safety Metrics

One of the more distinctive elements of Apex's EHS program is how they measure injury severity. Rather than relying solely on OSHA's TRIR — which only counts recordable incidents — Apex tracks what they call a "Hurt Rate": every injury, regardless of severity, measured as a rate against total work hours.

"If somebody smashed a finger, if somebody got a minor cut — even first aid — we capture that," Conley said. "I want to know about it."

Apex worked with EHS Insight's customer service team to build the Hurt Rate metric directly into their company profile within the platform. Now, Conley can pull the Hurt Rate through EHS Insight's AI Copilot alongside incident data and work hours, and surface it in monthly leadership reports without manual calculation or spreadsheet reconciliation.

"We validated the numbers manually three or four times at the start," Conley said. "Once they came up consistently, we stopped double-checking. Now we use it for everything."

What's Next: Building a True One-Stop EHS Platform

Apex is treating 2026 as the year they complete their EHS Insight buildout. On the roadmap: audits and inspections for monthly, quarterly, and annual facility reviews; SDS and chemical management with QR-code scanning for digital job packs; employee training through the MARCOM partnership; API integration with HR to sync employee profiles; and sustainability reporting for Apex's ESG team.

"Because it's flexible and easy to use, I can see our toolbox talks, our permit-to-work process — a lot of this becoming a one-stop shop for everything we do," Conley said.

The goal isn't to add more software to the stack. It's to remove everything else from it.

Key Takeaways

For EHS professionals evaluating software platforms:

• Implementation speed matters. Apex went from contract to live users in 4 months — driven by templates that were close to ready and a support team that moved quickly on customizations.
• Customization depth is a differentiator. The ability to build a first-of-its-kind ROCC reporting module gave Apex capabilities no competing vendor could offer.
• Ease of access drives reporting culture. When employees can submit observations from their phones in the field, reporting volume increases — and that's a leading indicator of a healthier safety program.
• AI-powered analytics change the conversation with leadership. Pulling a custom injury metric through AI Copilot and presenting it in monthly reports is a fundamentally different experience than manually building it in a spreadsheet.

Apex Energy is a U.S.-based energy company with operations and construction teams across the country. Jason Conley has been a safety professional for 18 years and joined Apex in 2022 as Director of Health and Safety.

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