About ElectrAssure
ElectrAssure is a commercial electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions provider with a solid reputation for providing reliable engineering support. Companies depend on ElectrAssure to install EV chargers to the highest standards and maintain and operate them UK-wide so they can keep their EV fleet vehicles on the road. One such company is National Grid, for which ElectrAssure is the sole supplier for a five-year programme of 1,500+ chargers across 290+ sites for service vehicles.
Connectivity is integral to ElectrAssure’s offering, to carry data between the EV charge points (EVCPs) and a charge point management system (CPMS), giving operators insight into power consumption, carbon dioxide savings, charger status, and more. This also supports ongoing management and maintenance, through fault alerts and the ability to perform software updates over-the-air (OTA), reducing the need for engineering visits.
Challenge
ElectrAssure prides itself on keeping customers’ vehicles on the road as it understands disruptive downtime comes at a financial and reputational cost. It works with quality EVCP manufacturers to deliver high availability but was frustrated by the minimal access it had to the SIMs, sitting at the heart of the EVCPs’ connectivity, once engineers had left site.
Alun Davies, Operations Director at ElectrAssure, explains: “We had access to a back-office portal from our CPMS provider but if something happened to, for example, their servers, that was outside our control, we would have no access to the charge point.”
Without direct SIM access, ElectrAssure had to contact the EVCP manufacturer or software provider with any queries. Alun wanted to be able to programme changes or run diagnostics themselves, without sending out an engineer.
It was also a challenge to interpret the sometimes-inconsistent information on charger condition and status. In some cases, the data allowed for only minimal insights—some simply reported a problem with no detail, making on-site attendance unavoidable, others provided a fault number that had to be interpreted through a fault log. Some did provide more detail, such as which part had failed, but back offices could interpret the information in different ways.
Maximising control over the EVCPs would deliver more resilience and a better all-round experience for both ElectrAssure and its customers, as problems could be identified and resolved more quickly. This would be more efficient and reduce costs through sending out fewer engineers. Resilience is very important to ElectrAssure’s existing and prospective customers; improving this would enhance in-life support and bolster market development efforts.
“We are very aware that our job of keeping customers’ fleets mobilised starts on the day we hand over those units,” says Alun. “Our ability to support our customers post-installation is what sets us apart.”
Solution
ElectrAssure wanted a connectivity provider with experience in its industry and was delighted to find this in Wireless Logic, which demonstrated that it understood what ElectrAssure wanted to achieve.
Wireless Logic recommended Conexa, the network that was built for the IoT including remote SIM provisioning (RSP) and SIMPro, the smart connectivity management platform. For security, it advocated a virtual private network (VPN) and IPSec—a secure network protocol—tunnel for data exchange.
The end-to-end solution with RSP equips ElectrAssure staff to commission SIMs from their desks, no matter where they are. The SIMs can support multiple network profiles and switch between these without engineers having to physically visit the charger. This provides the flexibility of changing conveniently to an alternative mobile network provider, either for commercial reasons or for the resilience of maintaining service during a network outage.
Alun says: “Being able to redirect charging units to an emergency back office in the event of a server disaster or a commercial issue is a massive part of our business continuity process, and the SIMs are a huge piece of that.”
Outcome
With Wireless Logic’s cellular connectivity, ElectrAssure has better visibility into the EVCP infrastructure it installs and maintains. It has improved the resilience of its customers’ EV charging solutions and with it, the reassurance of business continuity for such important assets.
“Now, we log into a dashboard to get charging behaviour, charge cycles, faults and logs to understand the problem,” says Alun. “In most cases, we can clear the fault ourselves. If that isn’t possible, we can still identify which part has failed and why, and book attendance quickly to take a new part to site, cutting lead times.”
Alun explains that ElectrAssure now has more control over the charge point estate and in a disaster recovery scenario, such as a data breach, it can point critical sites to an alternative back office within hours, rather than days or weeks.
ElectrAssure’s customers, meanwhile, have peace of mind that their EVCPs are resilient and will be brought back online as rapidly as possible to keep their service fleets operational.
Remote SIM provisioning helps ElectrAssure be as efficient as possible, bringing EVCPs online from ElectrAssure’s office, rather than holding engineers at customer sites until connections are established.
Alun cites an example in Weymouth that clearly demonstrates the resource and cost benefits of this when six-man days’ worth of labour was saved through remote activation. Clearly, reducing time-to-online serves customers better too, not least with ElectrAssure’s customer where missing an installation window could mean a wait of 90 days for the next opportunity.
“By being able to access the SIM cards and remotely provision the units and do it all through the Wireless Logic portal, we were complete, paid, operational, and all the things we should have been, on time,” says Alun.
As companies strive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, many will turn to EV charging for their commercial fleets. ElectrAssure will continue to innovate, and explore new and additional ways to deliver robust, resilient, intelligent charging solutions. As it does so, it can depend on its partnership with Wireless Logic to maximise the opportunity and benefits of the connected IoT to help serve customers and reach business goals.
Find out more about Wireless Logic’s GSMA certified, mobile core network, designed and built to solve IoT’s deployment challenges, explore Conexa. You can also get in touch with us to discuss.
The gamechanger for us has been around visibility and demonstration of resilience and business continuity to customers with critical fleets