Charging and maintaining EV fleets takes self-knowledge and the right IT

By Senta Belay, solution manager in the travel and transportation industry business unit at SAP

The transition to electric vehicle fleets is underway. There are many positives: low per-mile costs, less pollution, less noise, and less maintenance (no oil to change; no timing belts to replace).

Of course, there are challenges too, chief among them maintaining and repairing still-novel vehicles and, perhaps foremost, managing charging.

While both demand some hard up-front thinking, there are software solutions that can help manage both, and they are evolving nearly as quickly fleet management is.

Let’s start with charge-point development and management. As the Association of Fleet Professionals chair Paul Hollick recently told Fleet News: “It’s not an exaggeration to say that charging is becoming the new maintenance in terms of the huge amount of attention it demands.”

The EV charging challenge

For fleet managers, managing charging starts with answering questions. How many electric vehicles will you have in the coming years?

What’s the mix of light, medium, and heavy duty? How far do they typically go in a given day? If you’re managing medium-duty or heavy-duty (MD/HD) vehicles, do they return to the depot at regular intervals or overnight?

Those answers are key to tackling yet more questions about the charging infrastructure you need. Where should you put chargers? Does the utility need to upgrade the distribution network to support them? To what extent can you use public chargers – or, in the case of light-duty vehicles, rely on chargers at drivers’ homes? How fast do your chargers need to be?

In the case of public transit, are there convenient hubs, terminals or park-and-ride stations where charging infrastructure can be installed strategically?

If you’re running a bus fleet and can plug in many EVs overnight, Level 2 charging could be enough. If not, you many need more direct current fast charging (DCFC), which can add more than 100 miles of range to an MD/HD EV in less than a half hour – but are much more costly.

Then there’s the matter of optimising charging in ways that lower costs and help reach sustainability goals while integrating energy services related to EV charging into your company’s day-to-day business processes.

The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a central role in data collection here, as EVs can constantly relay charge status and EV chargers can track what vehicles are charging and for how long.

With that data, emerging solutions can do a few things for fleet managers. On the charge-point operations side, they can manage and monitor charging stations and locations, including factors such as start time, duration, types of connectors, the amount of energy delivered and the cost of that energy, and the state of charge for the vehicles plugged in. 

Because these systems can track individual vehicle IDs and related drivers’ badges, they can help manage the problem of reimbursing employees for the cost home charging fleet vehicles.

That benefits both the employee and the fleet owner: The employee gets the convenience and fair compensation; the fleet owner gets the demand relief.

There’s also been interesting innovation on the energy-delivery side. By tracking energy being delivered based on how it’s generated and utility-side demand patterns, fleet owners have seen grid-fee savings of around 20%.

These same systems can also help fleet managers exploit existing charging infrastructure to avoid having to build more of their own. The savings there can be in the 30% range.

Smart EV fleet maintenance

While charging may have superseded maintenance as fleet managers’ primary EV-related concern, maintenance is still a challenge. Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can provide a big lift here on a couple of fronts.

EVs are rolling computers, and while they require less maintenance, they’re not zero-maintenance, and accidents do happen.

Technicians need to be reskilled and upskilled in huge numbers. Learning management systems and talent management systems, both of which integrate with core HR systems, take on renewed importance given what is shaping up to be a huge pulse of training and retraining combined with a skilled-labor shortage.

ERPs with embedded enterprise asset management capabilities can also make nuts-and-bolts maintenance and asset management much easier for fleet managers.

Not only can these systems do their traditional work of tracking vehicles, equipment, and parts, but they can also help assign maintenance engineers and then track materials and consumables throughout the supply chain.

Going forward, these systems will increasingly embed intelligence related to a vehicle’s battery’s status and inevitable degradation, letting you stay on top of its most expensive component.

Coming soon are digital twins of every vehicle in a fleet. They will be constantly refined with data from IoT-sensor-fed operational data that feed into a digital representation of the vehicle.

That can bring insights to preventative maintenance, reuse and repurposing, and end-of-life disposition.

The electrification of vehicle fleets represents the biggest disruption to fleet management since the horse gave way to the internal-combustion engine.

Fortunately, the technologies are there to help you manage the transition, and, like EVs themselves, they’re getting better with each passing day.