Cambridge MC Supports Delivery of Global EV Charging Hubs

Specific Challenges

• Client's huge efforts to establish themselves in the EV charging market in UK, EU, ANZ, and US led to a significant disconnect between company departments involved in the programme delivery. 

• Most of the client's attention was placed towards finding the right partners for the EV charging hardware, but there was no dedicated point of contact to provide expert advice on the network connectivity—as this aspect of the delivery had not been properly assessed before deployment activities started. This disconnect led to a missed opportunity to leverage customer owned network infrastructure, which was pre-existing at most EV charging locations. 

• The lack of cooperation and visibility across departments involved in the EV charging programme led to different engineering and networking standards used in the countries that are part of the EV charging programme, resulting in not only the customer incurring unnecessary costs of the rework/re-design, but also the monthly recurring charges of an inadequate network solution.

• The complexity of the programme required a large number of teams to be mobilised and focused on delivery in each country/region. Specific teams were set up to promote the EV charging services to other strategic partners with various types of offers. None of these teams cooperated with the network connectivity teams in any efficient, regular, or scalable manner. And although a high level agreement was made to promote a single, cookie-cutter network connectivity solution (moving away from SIM cards towards hard wired connectivity), no steps were taken to translate this agreement into action on a global scale.
  

Solutions

• Our first objective was to understand the organisational structure of the various departments working on the EV charging programme. The access to site designs, engineering standards, site plans, and future deployment plans was crucial to understanding the scope and to propose a viable network solution. At the end of this investigation, we had 1291 sites of various sizes in scope, spread across 8 countries and 3 continents. This scope was always changing as the number of sites was set not by our client's team, but by an altogether different department. 

• Due to global chip shortages, the lead time on network equipment has been 3-4 times longer than normal, so it became critical to ensure that purchase orders were placed in time and the costs included in the appropriate budgets. Once we understood the scope and targets the client was set to achieve, we finalised the solution and calculated the amount of network equipment needed to deliver the service. We managed the network equipment ordering and delivery process.

• At the same time, we were informed of a BT/Openreach partnership with our customer and were asked to manage the delivery of the  lines for high priority EV hub sites. We became the main point of contact and immediately saw the challenges with new line deliveries. As part of the feasibility study, they required us to know not only which BT products were available on each potential EV hub location, but also what point of connection BT/Openreach use to connect from, and what route the new line would need to take. This requirement was resolved by ordering and managing standalone surveys and by requesting a dedicated Openreach Project manager who would support all new line deliveries for our customer. 
  

Further Challenges

• The next challenge was to ensure all sites have the necessary network infrastructure provided during the civil works for the EV chargers. This way, the cabling is done by the same EPC who is pulling electric cables, therefore minimising the costs of this activity and reducing the duration.

• The EPC contractors needed a clear set of instructions and SoW. Our team took the initiative to put the necessary documentation together and work with the customer’s global engineering teams to add this new requirement to their official engineering standards.

• During this lengthy process, the client was not only extending the scope of various types of delivery (i.e. greenfield sites v. brownfield sites; unmanned sites v. large retail sites) but also discovering new devices requiring network connectivity as per the EV chargers manufacturers’ designs, e.g. LV pillars.

• This new standard was crucial in implementing a new network connectivity design that ensured all EV charging sites utilise customer’s pre-existing network infrastructure, which was uplifted if necessary, e.g. bandwidth increase on an existing circuit, additional switch/access point installed and configured, etc. Our team was tasked to make the decision and chose an approach which is site specific but also in line with the ‘cookie-cutter’ solution our client requested.

• As the client's EV estate grew, it became obvious that our team needs to work more closely with product owners and have access to technical specs of various EV charger manufacturers. Each model posed a new challenge as some manufacturers did not have ethernet connectivity enabled for the specific charger or are using a single unmanaged network device to provide connectivity for up to 4 chargers at the same time.



• These variants needed to be explored and captured in the network design documents, and signed off by client network architects and digital security. We also had to ensure the new network solution contains provisions for a PCI compliant payment solution.

• The biggest challenge has always been communication. Decisions made at a high level were not properly communicated to all the team leads and our team was put in a position where we had to explain decisions and requests to various technical and non-technical departments within its organisation—as well as to their third party vendors and other suppliers. Securing their support and trust, necessary for implementation of the new network solution, required building a strong relationship and gaining knowledge of their SoW, targets and approaches.
  

Team