At ACT Expo 2024, I had the opportunity to present on the operational and financial challenges facing fleet operators as they navigate multi-manufacturer charging infrastructure. The session focused on how modern, platform-agnostic charge management systems (CMS) can dramatically reduce complexity and lower total cost of ownership.
The Challenge
Fleet operators today face a fragmented charging landscape. Through acquisitions, varying use case requirements, and legacy hardware maintenance, most operators manage charging infrastructure from multiple manufacturers. This creates operational headaches: different management interfaces, disparate service protocols, varying data formats, and complex vendor relationships.
The CMS Solution
My presentation explored how comprehensive charge management systems address these challenges by:
- Providing unified visibility across all charging hardware regardless of manufacturer
- Enabling consistent service and maintenance workflows across diverse equipment
- Delivering normalized data and analytics for meaningful cross-platform insights
- Maintaining manufacturer support relationships while reducing operational overhead
The key insight: platform-agnostic approaches allow operators to make hardware decisions based on technical and economic fit for each specific application, confident that their management infrastructure remains consistent and capable regardless of brand choices.
Panel Discussion
Following the presentation, I participated in a panel discussion with industry experts, addressing real-world implementation challenges, integration strategies, and best practices for CMS deployment. The Q&A session with the audience covered topics ranging from OCPP implementation nuances to predictive maintenance capabilities and API integration patterns.
Presentation Materials
View the full presentation (PDF)
For more details on InControl's charge management capabilities, see the InControl project page.