Serving One of the Country’s Largest IOUs: A Davey Resource Group Case Study

How a 200-person engineering services team applies the Davey standard across the six utility operating companies, with Katapult Pro as one tool in their kit.

Davey Resource Group is the utility asset management arm of The Davey Tree Expert Company, founded in 1880 and headquartered in Kent, Ohio. With 12,000 employees, top-ten employee-owned standing in the U.S., and nearly a century and a half of accumulated practice, Davey has built a reputation across the utility industry for a standard that gets set inside the company before any client ever enforces it. Continuous improvement is in their DNA, and it shows up everywhere from how the team picks its tools to how they use them on behalf of their clients.

Clark Ristaino runs the engineering services teams supporting six utility operating companies. Roughly 200 people on his team work inside that scope day to day, serving one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the country. The bar for what they deliver is set in three places: by Davey’s own internal standard, by their customer’s distribution standards, and by the operational realities of joint use work at volume.

An operation like that runs on a multitude of technologies and workflows. Designers, field operations, admin intake, and quality assurance each have their own deliverables, and the team is intentional about how technology supports each function. Katapult Pro is one piece of that toolkit, and the platform Clark’s team chose for joint use design, field collection, and quality review across the utility footprint. About 80% of the team is in it daily, and the designers, who Clark calls his “power users,” drive the deepest use.

That choice came after years of running joint use work and pole loading on other platforms. What shifted for his the team was the bar coming from their clients:

“The scope of our clients’ expectations has changed dramatically over the last several years, including requirements that relied on not only a larger amount of data, but also more precise data.”

Clark Ristaino, Area Manager, Davey Resource Group

As clients began asking for more data and tighter precision on every application, the challenge for Clark’s team was to find which workflow would help them deliver at that bar without sacrificing field safety or office output. The move to Katapult Pro was the answer: collection at higher volumes, an annotated photo record they could verify in the office, and a design environment that surfaces client-specific requirements directly to the people doing the work.

“We found that as work volumes increased, the ability to collect work in the field at volume proved difficult due to the inherent level of detail required. Now, using Katapult Pro, we have a safer alternative that also allows for collection at higher volumes.”

What that decision looks like in practice came into focus during a recent week of work. Across nine two-person field teams, Davey Resource Group collected 3,530 poles in a single week, roughly 392 poles per team. Clark notes that throughput wasn’t reachable on the old approach, and with application volume continuing to climb across the footprint heading into the summer of 2026, capacity at that level is what keeps the work flowing for clients counting on it.

“Our Field Operations were able to collect 3,530 poles using Katapult, across 9 teams (2-man teams). This resulted in about 392 poles per team, a number that could not be achieved through our old method of collecting data. Being able to collect data at this volume helps set us up for success with our clients, as we see unprecedented workloads in 2026.”

Equally important is what happens once the data leaves the field. Designers work in a side-by-side, proposed-versus-existing view, with automated violation flagging configured by both equipment type and client-specific requirements. The annotated photo models replaced the CAD-style models the team had previously relied on, which gives QA a verification path that doesn’t hinge on perfect field collection from traditional methods.

“Rather than needing to rely on 100% accurate data collection in the field, Katapult Pro’s annotated models allowed us to catch these things in office, reducing the need for dispatching teams back to the field for additional data.”

When the utility updated their pole loading requirements, plenty of consulting teams in the region had to scramble. They didn’t, because Davey reads the road ahead. The integrated, real-time PLA inside Katapult Pro was already part of their workflow when the new requirements landed, and that wasn’t an accident. It was the result of a team that evaluates tooling against where their clients are going, not just where they are.

“When they rolled out their updated pole loading requirements, we were excited to start utilizing Katapult Pro’s integrated PLA for this exact reason. No more back and forth between programs. This helped to reduce costs to the client, and allowed the team to work more fluidly, increasing overall pole output.”

“It allowed us to have one singular platform to work out of, rather than having to use two or more to get the same product and outcome.”

The same instinct shows up in how Davey serves the applicant side of joint use. As Davey Resource Group continues to grow their services for communications providers (the ones submitting attachment requests through utilities), the team applies the same platform that runs the utility-side design and QA work. Applicants get real-time visibility on where their projects sit and can make routing decisions on actual data instead of guessing.

“Katapult Pro’s sharing capabilities have been invaluable for providing our communication clients the most up-to-date and real time information on their projects, and has allowed them to make informed decisions on the most cost-effective routes.”

Davey’s standard comes first. They choose tools that can carry that standard at the volume, precision, and safety their clients require, and they apply each tool with the discipline of a team that has been refining its craft for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Being one of the tools in that kit is a huge honor for us at Katapult. The team supporting the utility’s six operating companies is meeting a bar set in three places at once, and Katapult Pro has to hold up to all three.

“If you want access to the best software in the business, companies need to be looking at Katapult.”

Want to find out if Katapult Pro is a good fit for your projects? Schedule a demo with our team today.