December 30, 2022 Deployment Operations Management is Key to Municipal EV

Best practices for municipal and country leaders building out much-needed electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure.

By Emily Obenauer

Municipal and country leaders around the country are now working to build out much-needed electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, often in close collaboration with industry experts. A new class of intelligent software – deployment operations management solutions – is proving to be indispensable in ensuring that constituents get maximum value from their taxpayer investments.

Given the explosive growth of the EV market, these cloud-based solutions will only become more important in planning and managing dozens, hundreds, or thousands of job sites, assets, and field crews in real-time as they combine the strengths of project, asset, and work-management software.

Rare is the jurisdiction that’s not considering a serious buildout of EV charging stations (technically called electric vehicle service equipment, or EVSE), and for good reason. EVs are central to meeting global climate goals, they reduce reliance on geopolitically fraught petrostates, and they are fun to drive. For those and other reasons, an EY survey of 1,100 auto executives found that about half of the vehicles sold by 2030 would probably be electric – right in line with White House goals. The Biden Administration’s target of having 500,000 public charging stations in place by 2030 is a logical extension of that prospective growth.

That’s about 10 times the number of U.S. public charging stations out there today. Bridging the gap means adding more than 3,000 public charging stations each month for the next eight years, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). That’s more than double the current pace of public EV charger installation.

Deployment operations management software is already being used by some of the country’s biggest EVSE companies. These systems are proving crucial in four key ways. They sharpen the planning phase. They speed implementation. They seamlessly manage maintenance from one centralized location. And, across those three areas of an EVSE buildout, they streamline vendor and labor management.

Sharpening planning

Local governments are very familiar with traffic simulation. Deployment operations management systems build on this with visualization tools that help plan for sites where the individual units of a portfolio of EV charging stations would be best placed. These systems also manage site candidates, approvals, and drawings, and they match deployment assets with job sites to ensure that equipment is where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.

In addition, machine learning algorithms use inputs from project managers, vendors, and market conditions to forecast project milestones and overall completion times. They can even help select the best vendors for specific jobs.

Speeding implementation

Deployment operations management solutions include standardized project templates, automated document generation, and easy-to-use mobile forms for field technicians. While every EVSE project has unique aspects (and these systems are customizable to reflect that), standardization along best practices cuts redundancy, avoids mistakes, and speeds the pace of work.

These solutions also automate complex back-office processes such as managing capital funding budgets and drawing approvals needed to get projects to closeout faster. Analytics deliver real-time insights through tailored reports and dashboards, and help identify how you can further improve business processes.

Managing maintenance

EV chargers are themselves complex systems, and complex systems, well, they can break. In the case of EVSE, that can have potentially serious consequences for both drivers whose cars need juice and for the pace of EV uptake. Deployment operations management solutions provide the ability to manage not only planning and implementation, but also operations and maintenance. On the maintenance front, they can determine the equipment and field technicians best suited to do a particular job based on sweeping visibility and real-time insights derived from cloud-based architectures providing a single source of truth.

Streamlining vendor and labor management

EVSE deployment requires skilled labor that’s in famously short supply. Deployment operations management systems’ ability to place scarce resources at the right place at the right time will be vital in ramping up large-scale EVSE deployments. These systems bring contractors into the fold, enabling collaboration on project schedules, job information and images, and site maps and history. This leads to faster deployments at a lower cost. Shorter job durations mean field techs can move on to the next job sooner, reducing staffing pressure. These standardized processes also embed industry and organizational knowledge into workflows that empower less-experienced staff to perform at higher levels and with less supervision.

It also bears repeating that the power of deployment operations management systems derives from having one data model in the cloud that delivers a clear view of your business. Having one holistic system to manage sites, assets, field work, finance, and other functions brings far better visibility into operations, faster and more efficient deployments, smoother labor and vendor management, and a quicker path to go-live than otherwise possible.

Deployment operations management systems are proving essential in enabling the rapid, efficient, and cost-effective buildout of the charging infrastructure that the EV revolution depends upon. These systems, whether running through governments or the contractors they work with, can do much to ensure the rapid rollout of critical EV charging infrastructure while ensuring the wise investment of taxpayer dollars, now and in our electrified future.

Emily Obenauer is senior manager, Product Marketing, Energy, at Sitetracker (https://www.sitetracker.com/)

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