How 3Pillar and a Clean Energy Manufacturer Built an Audit-Verified Security Platform for Tracking Every Device’s Software
In just months, the manufacturer’s US team and 3Pillar replaced scattered spreadsheets and ad hoc visibility into “chain of custody” with a self-service platform, used by customers and internal teams alike, that passes major independent security audits and needs just one developer to maintain.
In the age of AI and increasing security expectations around physical devices, auditors and enterprise customers have started asking equipment makers new questions about device security. What software is running on each installed device? Who gets access, when was it last updated and how accessible is it? For many equipment categories, security questionnaires now ask public companies how they verify their data, vet their vendors and trace chain of custody across connected systems.
For our client, the US business of a clean energy manufacturer specializing in power conversion and storage, those questions concerned devices installed across the country and organizations.
Five months after their executive sponsor brought in 3Pillar to help navigate this emerging challenge, the company achieved a platform of its own where customers and internal teams can look up the full software history of every device they operate. Self service, new levels of visibility and deepened customer trust are all a result.
| Client | The US business of a globally positioned clean energy manufacturer |
|---|---|
| Industry | Clean energy, specializing in power conversion and storage |
| 3Pillar role | Product discovery, UX, data engineering, and security, delivered with “AIRE”-governed agentic engineering |
| Results |
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Enterprise customer questions were growing at the same speed as booming market adoption
The company’s US business grew quickly over the past few years as the business value of clean energy infrastructure became clear. As a hardware company first and foremost, centralized software-enabled record-keeping trailed that growth.
Installed equipment, their software versions and logs, and each customer’s individual service contract status lived in separate spreadsheets owned by separate teams.
That highly manual system worked while enterprise documentation requests were occasional and could be managed as-needed, but this was changing fast.
Requests stopped being occasional, shifting from a customer support need to a feature need.
Today, enterprise buyers of energy equipment need detail on every component of their supply chain and environment, and they need it early, during due diligence and procurement. SOC 2 and similar certifications depend on it.
Every request meant someone figuring out an answer by hand, and that volume wasn’t tenable for the team.
Alexandra Machado, 3Pillar’s client partner on the engagement, sees similar pressure across the market: “They’re getting demands from their clients, it’s growing, and they’re in a state of human team-member overwhelm and they don’t have a path forward.”
The client’s executive sponsor had a path in mind that might set the company up right for this changing landscape. A self-service portal where customers, account managers, and service staff could look up any device and see its full history without waiting for someone to compile it. Secure, privileged and current with all of the information needed to satisfy these new needs.
Instead of buying a static tool and configuring around it, the sponsor chose to build a single source of truth for device and supply chain data, bundled with the core product.
It was an ambitious call for a company with no real code repository and no history of building software.
Four weeks of product-minded discovery gave the client’s sponsor a defensible case for building
3Pillar opened with a discovery workshop grounded in The Product Mindset, an approach we wrote the book on. Process-wise, over four weeks the 3Pillar team ran interactive sessions with roughly 50 stakeholders across 14 groups. The sponsor and our team used the engagement to learn more about the organization as much as to specify software features.
According to Sohil Shah, the 3Pillar Product Lead on the work, “we worked with many parties and really strived to dig into the need with real-world users. About half of the groups we ended up speaking to had not been on the roadmap when the work began.”
We knew the importance of bringing ideas to life so UX work started in the room. The team prototyped live in the room with Claude Code, turning conversations into screens that client stakeholders could react to real-time. Ideas weren’t hypothetical, they were presented and discussed as tangible experiences.
It’s much easier to say ‘I don’t like something’ when you can see it, or ‘Could we change this?’, than it is to try to imagine something from scratch when you’ve never built something.
Alexandra Machado Client Partner, 3Pillar
These discovery sessions actually generated changes faster than the team could turn them around the same day, so Sohil’s team prioritized and batched them.
By the end of discovery the client had an actual working prototype and our sponsor presented it to their own leadership at the parent company to win approval for the build. We’ve since used this same approach to explore new workstreams with the client.
The new observability platform turns scattered records into centralized, purposeful data that customers can check themselves
Beyond the UX, the real core of the build was data engineering: pulling device records, software versions, and contract status out of separate spreadsheets and into one source the company could stand behind, and grow upon.
Every next software update is recorded with the version and where it came from, so a device’s history reads as an unbroken chain. Data enters only from known sources, which rules out injected or unverified records.
This single record now serves three important audiences. Customers log in to see their own devices, while account managers and service staff use the same view so that procurement questions get simpler and more accurate.
Security was designed in from the start, with deep in-house 3Pillar expertise partnered with the client to shape the product. As Alexandra notes, “many security potentialities can be solved at the data’s or product’s point of origin and creation, so where the data comes into the system and how you build the product.” Sohil’s team wrote security requirements into the delivery framework as code, so engineering teams and agents build to control sets such as NERC CIP.
A major US security audit firm then reviewed the platform to confirm that code, data handling, and chain of custody exceed market requirements and meet the client’s vision for the platform.
AI-native delivery gave a company new to software a platform that keeps improving
The build started from nothing: no repository, not even an AWS account. “We came in with an opinion on cloud,” Sohil says, and the team recommended AWS over the client’s Azure setup. Delivery ran on AIRE, 3Pillar’s governed approach to agentic engineering, using a framework Sohil’s team built on GitHub and Claude Code with QA and governance layers.
To measure the lift, the team estimated each story in traditional story points and logged the actual delivery time beside that benchmark. Over the last four to five build cycles, the team has settled at roughly three times traditional scrum velocity.
3x velocity. Two lead engineers sustained the output of a traditional team of eight.
Today, releases are shipped every three weeks, users send feedback daily, and that feedback goes straight into the next cycle. Our client owns the platform and 3Pillar even supported hiring the developer who now maintains it.
The architecture was designed so that a platform of this size needs one full-time dev to do that job.
The engineering quality and speed experienced here is what makes the platform a durable part of the client’s product experience today and tomorrow.
As Sohil adds, “They also appreciate the flexibility around changing product requirements which really has allowed them to operate seamlessly and without worry, even with many stakeholder directives and needs.”
A business built on hardware and sales now runs a software product that improves every two weeks, with a roadmap working with 3Pillar that now extends over two more years. Questions from customers (and their auditors) will keep changing and the company now has a platform, and partner, built to change with them.
3Pillar designs products for organizations facing complex regulatory and customer demands, bringing data engineering, UX, and AI-native delivery together to build solutions that withstand scrutiny and keep improving after launch. Explore our Digital Products & Experiences work, or see how Helix Pods put AI-native teams to work. If you’re working through a challenge like this one, we’d love to talk.
