From Iowa Pilot to Multi-State Rollout: How Tepa Standardizsed Safety with Breadcrumb

Last updated: 24 March 2026

The Tepa Companies started with a Breadcrumb pilot on their Iowa jobsites last year. What followed was a 50% reduction in orientation time, hours of backend admin gone, and real-time visibility into who’s on site and when. They've since made Breadcrumb their standard across projects in Iowa, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Texas. Here's how they got there.

The Story of Tepa

Headquartered in the Midwest, Tepa delivers sustainably built projects across the US and around the globe. 

At Tepa, safety is one of their core values. But, as their project portfolio grew, two challenges kept coming up. Documentation was inconsistent across sites, creating hours of backend admin for their safety team. And orienting large crews, particularly multilingual ones, was eating up hours at the start of the workday.

They needed a solution that could handle orientations at any scale, automate documentation, and support every worker regardless of language. 

Jennifer Ludwig, Senior Vice President of Project Operations at Tepa, says Breadcrumb stood out as the answer.

"Breadcrumb was one of those opportunities that we found was critical in making our teams in the field more efficient in what they do. The capabilities it presented to allow our teams to better communicate and track safety information made a lot of sense to our growing company.”

Tepa's jobsites in Iowa were the first to pilot Breadcrumb. Within months, the pilot became the playbook. Breadcrumb is now Tepa's standard on new contracts in the Midwest. 

“We have continued to roll Breadcrumb out in some of our active projects and have made it a company standard for all new projects that are managed in Procore,” says Jennifer. 

Here are the results Tepa has achieved with Breadcrumb.

Faster Orientations for Large Crews Without Lowering Standards

Previously, getting a large crew cleared to work was a slow process. Every worker had to come into the job trailer and complete their orientation paperwork on a shared device. With only a handful of devices available on-site, workers queued up and waited for their turn. Five minutes per person for a crew of 20 added up fast.

Breadcrumb changed the equation. After the site presentation, each worker completes a digital orientation on their own phone, at their own pace. The safety team reviews and approves submissions on the backend. And if a superintendent needs to run an orientation without a safety officer present, they can, because the process is standardized.

Tepa Staff Site Safety and Health Officer Jordan Stokes shares,

"The orientation presentation itself takes the same amount of time, but simultaneously being able to go through the checkboxes and sign and upload their picture is a lot quicker. We've halved the time it used to take.”

What the safety team didn't expect was an improvement in worker engagement. In group-led orientations, it's natural for attention to drift when everyone is moving at the same pace (especially for experienced workers who have been through the same process many times before). When workers go through the orientation individually on their own device, they're in control of their own site safety experience.

"When I say to the crew, okay, take a few minutes to read through this, I see each person reviewing the PowerPoint on their own. They're able to go at their pace, whether that's a little quicker or a little slower. I think it just engages them more if they can do it how they want to,” Jordan says. 

The mobility of Breadcrumb has also changed how Jordan works in the field. She carries a QR code in her vest at all times so even short-term visitors like surveyors or inspectors can complete an orientation on the spot, without a trip to the trailer.

"I want to provide orientations to people in a convenient way. If someone will be on-site for a short duration, it makes more sense to provide a visitor orientation in the field,” says Jordan.

Cleaner Documentation and Less Backend Admin

The time savings during orientation were significant, but they told only part of the story.

The hidden cost had always been what happened after the orientation, specifically the backend work required to make safety records usable. When using generic forms in Procore, completed orientations would save under default file names that didn't include the worker's name or the date. Every record had to be manually reopened, renamed, and reformatted before it was searchable or audit-ready.

On a busy week with multiple crews, that added up quickly.

Jordan explains, "When you complete a form on Procore, if you don't change the name, it just saves as Site Orientation Checklist, number one, number two, number three. I don't know whose it is, so I have to go back in, change the name, put the date on it. That's where the time is actually saved."

With Breadcrumb, workers enter their own details during the orientation, and everything saves automatically in a consistent format and is searchable in Tepa’s Procore. For Jordan, it removed a task that had been quietly consuming time every single week.

"Anything that makes my life at work more organized is an asset, because being on a construction site is not always organized,” Jordan says. 

The documentation itself has also become a genuine asset. With photos, signatures, and timestamps attached to every record, Tepa has a digital audit trail that protects both the company and the workers on-site.

Complete Jobsite Visibility and Multilingual Support

Two capabilities Tepa hadn't initially anticipated turned out to have some of the most meaningful real-world impact. The first was multilingual support. The second was complete visibility into who is on-site at any given time.

When a Spanish-speaking crew arrived on-site, Breadcrumb’s multilingual support feature meant every worker could move through their orientation in their native language, with slides and questions served in Spanish.

For a safety team responsible for ensuring EM 385-1-1 requirements are genuinely understood and not just acknowledged, the difference mattered.

"When we're communicating important things like safety regulations required, that's something I don't want to get lost in translation, literally. It’s really important for safety information to be provided in a way that’s accessible for everyone," Jordan shares. 

The photo verification and attendance features addressed a different but equally real challenge: return crews. Construction teams often cycle on and off projects for months, and when multiple workers share the same first name, verifying orientation history from memory alone isn’t reliable.

Breadcrumb’s attendance tool lets Jordan and her team sort returning workers by company, name, or photo in seconds. So, if three workers named Mike show up at the trailer, she knows immediately who's certified and who needs to go through orientation before they start work.

"Throughout the day, I complete site walks and make sure no one has shown up that hasn't checked in. I use the attendance tool all the time," says Jordan.

Instant, Direct Communication Across the Entire Jobsite

On a construction site, conditions change fast—a crane performing a pick, a weather event rolling in, a work permit that needs action before work can continue. When this happens, information needs to reach every single worker on-site, not just foremen, and it needs to reach them immediately.

With Breadcrumb's site alerts, Jordan and her team can push an SMS notification directly to every checked-in person on-site in seconds. Whether communicating lightning stand-downs, meeting notifications, or daylight and work condition updates, site alerts have become, by Jordan's own account, her favorite feature.

Jordan notes, "We use it multiple times a day. I think that's probably the function we use the most."

Overall Results

Since rolling out Breadcrumb, Tepa has achieved what they set out to do. They've maintained safety standards across their jobsites, even as project complexity and crew sizes grew.

The proof is in the results. Orientations run faster without compromising standards, every worker on-site is accounted for in real time, and diverse crews can move through orientations in their own language.

And because everything lives on the Breadcrumb app, Jordan and her team are no longer tethered to the job trailer. Safety management happens in the field, in real time, which is exactly where it should be.

The clearest measure of success is the scale of adoption. What started as a pilot on a single Iowa site is now Tepa's standard across five to six active sites, with more planned as new contracts are awarded.

"By centralizing documentation and simplifying how information is shared, Breadcrumb has enhanced our productivity and strengthened our safety culture,” says Jordan. 

Jasper Rouget, Vice President of Sales at Breadcrumb North America, adds, “Engaging a bilingual workforce is a challenge we see across the US. Tepa rolling out Breadcrumb shows the industry now has a solution to engage everyone on-site, regardless of the language they speak. It’s something we’re really proud of.”