Imagine conducting an audit of 1.2 million roadside utility poles across multiple states — their exact locations, the equipment and services they carry, their age and condition. The data collection and management efforts alone would be overwhelming. Now imagine also removing outdated equipment for tens of thousands of poles while also replacing aging ones, managing the nearby vegetation and minimizing environmental impact. That’s just one of several monumental projects recently completed by the Davey Resource Group (DRG).

DRG is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Davey Tree Expert Company, the eighth-largest employee-owned company in the United States. The Ohio-based company provides several important services to a wide range of clients, including utility asset management, utility vegetation management, environmental consulting and mitigation services. They do everything from invasive species remediation to laying fiber optic cables and wetland restoration.

Clinton McFall, Director of Technical Services for the Utility Asset Management division, oversees the data teams at DRG. He’s an expert in systems integration, enterprise innovation and workflow optimization. In his 9 years at DRG, he’s led the deployment of several enterprise-scale projects, including large integrations with SAP ECC and S4 HANA, the creation of proprietary software and a data center migration to the cloud.

Here are some highlights from my recent conversation with Clinton on the Fivetran Data Podcast. 

Safety first: The impact of real-time data analysis

Given their wide range of work, DRG manages several large data sets that blend proprietary, public and client data. They use BigQuery for analysis and a variety of BI tools, all backed by data pipelines built with Fivetran for high-volume data replication. “Fivetran is a partner of ours,” shares McFall. “Being able to generate reports on a daily basis is powerful, but being able to have data in real-time, that’s a different ballgame.”

Employee safety is a valuable use case for DRG’s real-time data reporting and analysis. Field technicians frequently work in areas with no connectivity. Real-time telematics data from DRG’s trucks can spot when employees may be lost or in trouble. “We’ve had folks whose vehicles were stuck with no cell service or anything. We were able to see they weren’t back to the yard in time and deploy some folks to help get them unstuck and back before the evening.”

Taking the next step forward with GenAI

DRG is also exploring the use of generative AI on its vast data stores. For McFall, its greatest appeal is the potential to allow clients to interrogate the data in new ways. Much of DRG’s data is geographic information system-based, so clients could ask questions about how many utility poles are in a zip code or what services are being hosted by poles in a specific area.

The move into LLM-based AI is one McFall takes seriously: “We have to be very mindful and we are very respectful of our clients and the owners of the data, [so] we are very particular about what ends up in the data lake in isolated data structures.” For DRG, it’s important to make sure the stories told with data are accurate and provide business value.

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Lessons in data leadership

Curiosity is a critical driver in McFall’s industry. To successfully lead his technical services team, he encourages his colleagues to push tools to their limits and analyze data in new ways to answer complex questions. “I've got a really amazing team of solutions architects. The fact that they are as curious as they are has led to new, innovative solutions that we would have never thought of behind the scenes.”

With the new breadth of data made accessible with Fivetran, McFall and his team see a future where data can continue to solve real-world problems in unprecedented ways.  

Listen to the full episode of the Fivetran Data Podcast with Clinton McFall, Director of Technical Services at DRG.