Pivotal turned to Sustainment to modernize and accelerate its sourcing operations. By centralizing RFQ creation, distribution, and evaluation in one integrated workflow, the Sustainment Platform brings structure, speed, and transparency to a process that was previously fragmented and manual.
About Pivotal
Pivotal is not a typical manufacturing story. The Palo Alto company builds the Helix, a single-seat, all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, an eVTOL, that needs no runway and, in its ultralight configuration, no pilot's license. The entire aircraft tilts for takeoff rather than rotating its rotors, a patented architecture refined over more than a decade, and it packs into a 16-foot trailer and goes from storage to sky in about 30 minutes.
The world has noticed. The Wall Street Journal put a reporter in the cockpit and titled the piece "I Test Drove a Flying Car. Get Ready, They're Here." Fox News broadcast a Helix takeoff live on air. The aircraft has collected an Edison Award, a Silver Stevie for new aerospace product of the year, Gold in the NY Product Design Awards, and Muse's Transportation Design of the Year, while Pivotal's fleet has logged more than 10,000 flights across 100+ locations with a growing community of certified pilots. Beyond personal flight, Pivotal builds for emergency response and defense.
Behind every one of those flights is an AS9100-certified manufacturing operation sourcing precision components at production scale, which is exactly where Sustainment comes in. When your product redefines a category, your supply chain has to keep up with it.
The challenge: sourcing scattered across tools
Before Sustainment, Pivotal's quoting process lived in the places most sourcing processes live: email threads, spreadsheets, and institutional memory. Every RFQ meant rebuilding the same request from scratch, chasing suppliers individually, and reconciling bids by hand. The work got done, but slowly, and the record of how decisions were made lived in inboxes rather than in a system.
The solution: one workflow from RFQ to award
With Sustainment, the Pivotal team issues standardized RFQs in minutes, distributes them to the right suppliers at once, and compares bids side by side as they come in. The team collaborates on evaluations inside the platform and awards business with full audit traceability, so every decision carries its own paper trail without anyone building one.
The result is a faster, more consistent, and more data-driven approach to supplier selection that directly improves commercial and operational outcomes.
"Sustainment has dramatically improved how we manage supplier quotes. What used to take days now takes hours. The platform brings structure, transparency, and speed to our sourcing process, and it's quickly becoming a cornerstone of our supply chain operations."
- Procurement Lead, Pivotal
The results
Shorter sourcing cycles. Cycle times cut across the entire RFQ-to-award process, with quotes that once took days returned in hours.
Increased supplier participation. Standardized, easy-to-answer RFQs drive broader and more competitive supplier response on every part.
Data-driven selection. Consistent, auditable award decisions the whole team can stand behind.
Orchestration, not another tab
Pivotal's story is what a system of action looks like in practice: the platform sits where the work already happens, removes clicks from the process rather than adding them, and turns every RFQ, bid, and award into structured data the team owns. That's the difference between software your team demos once and software that becomes a cornerstone of operations.
Want to learn how Sustainment can support your sourcing team? Schedule a discovery call or email hello@sustainment.com.