Customer Case Study

Rachel Mead (Senior GIS Manager, Pivot Energy)

Interview Date: Winter, 2025

Customer Overview

Founded in 2009, Pivot Energy is a leading national renewable energy provider and independent power producer that develops, owns, and operates solar and energy storage projects. Pivot delivers renewable energy solutions that strengthen local economies, create jobs, and provide affordable, reliable power for businesses and communities across the U.S. As a Certified B Corporation, Pivot combines purpose and performance to ensure every project generates meaningful economic and social value. Pivot is an ECP portfolio company. Learn more at pivotenergy.net.

Pivot’s expanding GIS team supports origination, development, EPC, and O&M workflows. Over the past four years, their GIS has evolved from a single-person function into an enterprise-level program supporting 50–100 internal users — a transformation requiring strong foundations in data architecture, governance, and scalable tooling.

Challenge

As Pivot’s project volume and internal dependency on geospatial decision-making grew, its ArcGIS environment needed to mature from an ad-hoc, single-user workflow to a well-structured enterprise ecosystem.

Key pressures included:

Growth Drivers

Increased project sizing requests

Rising demand for standardized spatial data

Internal tools expanding beyond AGOL/Pro

Move toward Enterprise deployment

Resulting Problems

Longer analysis cycles

Lack of structure led to re-work

Need for scalable architecture & automation

Support and consolidation required

Pivot was building an environment to last and needed guidance on how to structure it right the first time.

Solution

Pivot engaged Equinox Geospatial for guidance on enterprise GIS evolution and application development. Early collaboration focused on:

Designing GIS data architecture and governance for long-term scalability
Supporting ArcGIS Enterprise deployment & portal lifecycle planning
Custom widget development implementation
Advisory support as AGOL winds down and ArcGIS Pro/Enterprise remain core

Development & EPC teams now leverage more consistent datasets, repeatable spatial analysis workflows, and emerging tools that shorten evaluation timelines for new project sites.

Customer Voice

“Working with John and Equinox has reinforced how critical it is to build the right data structure early. It’s often overlooked — but it determines everything you can do later"

—Rachel Mead, Senior GIS Manager | Pivot Energy

Impact

Equinox helped Pivot lay the technical groundwork needed to scale:

Stronger data foundations to support enterprise-wide GIS
Faster development site evaluations
More efficient analyst workflows and reduced re-processing
Roadmap alignment for internal tooling and future customer-facing applications

Pivot’s GIS department has grown strategically and is a key operational function for its business and operations model. Expanding our toolkit and external partnerships has established increased confidence in being able to support the growing and challenging solar development demands for years to come.