Kandji vs Rippling IT for a Commercial Solar EPC Firm

Yes, if the survey and permitting devices are genuinely all iPads. Kandji's zero-touch enrollment through Apple Business Manager means a replacement iPad can ship straight to a crew lead already configured with the survey app and company Wi-Fi settings, and enforced encryption matters given how much site-specific permitting and structural data lives on those devices. It has no reach into the Windows machines your engineering and project management teams likely run, so it's a field-device answer, not a whole-company one.

EPC firms tend to have engineering staff on Windows-based CAD and structural software and project management or business development on Mac, which is exactly the kind of split Rippling IT is built to cover from one console. If your office fleet is genuinely mixed and you don't want to run Kandji for the Macs and something else for the Windows machines, Rippling IT's cross-platform reach removes that split entirely.

Most EPC firms lean on subcontracted crews for installation labor, and those crews typically use their own devices rather than company-issued ones. Don't enroll a subcontractor's personal tablet in your MDM platform; it's not your equipment to manage, and doing so creates liability without much real security benefit. Instead, scope subcontractor access to a permitting or project management app with its own login, and revoke that access the day the subcontract closes out, independent of whatever device management covers your own crews.

If the iPad is company-owned and assigned to your own crew lead, offboarding should wipe local data and reassign the device the same day the project closes, which is straightforward if enrollment is already tied to your project or hiring records. If the device belongs to a subcontractor, the real answer is that the data lives wherever it was uploaded to your permitting or project system, not on a device you control, which is exactly why company-owned devices for anything holding sensitive structural or permitting data are worth the cost even on a subcontractor-heavy job.

When a job ends or a crew changes, handle survey data in this order:

1. Confirm whether the iPad is company-owned or belongs to a subcontractor before deciding what can be wiped.
2. For a company iPad assigned to your own crew lead, wipe local data and reassign the device the same day the project closes.
3. Keep enrollment tied to project or hiring records, so that same-day wipe does not depend on someone remembering.
4. For subcontractor devices, skip enrollment and limit what those crews can reach through app-level access instead.
5. Check that remote lock and wipe work over cellular, not only Wi-Fi, since a lost device on a job site rarely has Wi-Fi.

Not directly for device management, but it's worth knowing that different states can require different permitting documentation formats, which sometimes means different apps or app versions running on the same survey iPad depending on the job's location. A platform that can push different app configurations to different device groups, rather than one blanket setup for the whole fleet, makes it easier to keep a Texas job's permitting app version separate from a California job's without manually reconfiguring devices between projects.

A firm scaling from one crew to several often considers hiring a dedicated operations or IT coordinator to manage field devices instead of adopting a platform. Price that against national wage data, which puts the median salary for a general operations manager at $105,770 a year¹: a role at that cost is worth it once you're coordinating device logistics across multiple simultaneous projects and states, but for one or two crews, a platform subscription handling enrollment and remote wipe automatically is usually the more efficient starting point.

Rooftop and structural survey work means real physical risk to hardware: a dropped iPad, a device left behind after a long day on site. Confirm before rollout that your chosen platform's remote lock and wipe actually works over cellular, not just Wi-Fi, since a lost device on a job site rarely has Wi-Fi access. Build a small buffer of spare enrolled iPads into your field kit so a crew lead who loses a device isn't stuck without one for the rest of a project.

Document the loss the same day it happens, including roughly where and how, rather than treating each incident as a one-off. A pattern of losses at a specific stage of a rooftop job, say, during panel installation rather than the initial survey, tells you something about where your field kit or carrying process needs to change, and that pattern only becomes visible if someone is actually tracking it.