With a rapidly increasing number of smart and IoT-enabled EV charging assets in use today, it is imperative that charge point owners and operators ensure that they are well-positioned to make use of the vast amount of data available to help increase uptime, reduce costs, and improve the EV charging customer experience.
David Cornish, Head of Product at Techniche, highlights the top KPIs and metrics that should be top of mind for EV charging owners and operators.
1. Uptime
- Drivers remain anxious around the switch to EV. News about EV chargers being unavailable for long periods of time means charger availability is the number one reason drivers are hesitant about swapping their ICE vehicle for an EV. They are concerned that they’ll arrive at a charger and find that it is out of action, potentially leaving them stranded.
- To combat this anxiety, governments around the world are introducing “uptime” regulations for EV Charging Networks – for example the USA has a proposed target of 97% uptime, while the UK has set their target at an ambitious 99%.
- Charge point owners and operators need to understand what the uptime of their network is, and how they can increase it, both to meet those regulations and improve the customer experience.
2. First time fix
- Ideally, you’d like 100% of your EV charging-related maintenance work orders to be fixed first time, never requiring rework, or an additional technician call out charge, not to mention the extra downtime. But while we all know that this is a worthwhile goal, it’s somewhat impractical.
- But there are things that charge point owners and operators can do to help influence this KPI. By using an automated & connected CMMS platform, CPO owners and operators can ensure that when an EV charging asset goes out of service, that the correct maintenance team, technician or vendor is automatically notified and dispatched with the consistent and correct information they need to ensure that they can fix the issue first time and get the charger back in service.
3. Charging sessions between failure
- This is an important statistic to keep an eye on and is useful when tracking the overall charger reliability, in addition to errors logged through the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) and CPO back-office systems.
- Some of the biggest causes of EV charger downtime are with the items not measured by these systems – the charging cables are heavy, and they fray and break more than you might imagine. The cable’s car connectors are plastic, which are often weaker and more brittle than you might expect, especially for those in warmer climates, where the chargers are often baked in sunshine year-round.
- Display screens and payment terminals also suffer from weathering and are often not picked up by the monitoring systems, and yet cause huge amounts of downtime.
- By measuring the number of charging sessions between failure on a component, as well as on an entire charger unit level, charge point owners and operators can earmark which chargers, manufacturers, models, and components are causing more than their share of outages and downtime, and start to move from a “reactive” method of maintenance, to a proactive, or even predictive method and spot issues before they cause downtime and customer dissatisfaction.
4. Planned maintenance
- As EV starts to become the primary method with which we power our vehicles, much like the uptime regulations, governments are looking at compliance bodies, laws, and regulations to ensure the safe operation and maintenance of the EV charging network.
- In general, EV chargers are low maintenance when compared to some other mobility industries. However, like all assets, they need to be regularly serviced to ensure that they are available for EV drivers when they are needed. This can include changing the filters, on both air, water and oil cooled chargers, and a visual inspection, to make sure that those parts that cannot be checked by automated monitoring are working as expected, for example, cables are not frayed, contacts are clean, charging port connectors and displays aren’t cracked, and payment terminals are working properly. Manufacturers often mandate that certain activities are carried out regularly to honour the warranty when the charging units break down.
- Managing and adhering to a proper planned maintenance schedule can save you huge amounts of cost, downtime, and frustration by spotting and fixing issues before they cause the chargers to go out of service.
5. Service level agreements
- As a charge point owner or operator, your contracts with third party maintenance contractors will mandate a specific service level.
- By accurately measuring the response time to reactive work orders at every stage of the lifecycle, from investigation and triage, to fix and final closeout, you’ll be able to ensure that your maintenance contractors are performing effectively, and positively contributing to the uptime of your EV charging network.
No matter your organization’s KPIs & metrics, your EV charging asset maintenance management system should be able to cut and slice the data however you need it. This means you can keep a close eye on your EV charging network and know that your data is up to date and accurate, enabling you to make unbiased and informed decisions on how to drive it forward.
Next steps …
Contact us to learn more about how the Techniche EV charging maintenance management system could help you reduce charger downtime and improve your customer experience.
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