01Case study · Highway & fuel retail
Cutting field dispatches in half on a 46-connector highway corridor
A corridor operator with sites spread over 600km of national highway rebuilt its fault-handling around remote triage — and stopped driving to reset chargers.
46
DC connectors across 17 sites
600km
Corridor length
~4 hrs
Average drive time to a site
The deployment
Profile
- Hardware
- Three vendors, 60kW and 120kW DC
- Sites
- 17, mostly co-located with fuel retail
- Team
- Two technicians covering the whole corridor
- Protocol
- OCPP 1.6J
The problem
What was in the way
- 01Every fault, however trivial, meant a four-hour drive — and a large share of those visits ended with nothing more than a power cycle.
- 02Forecourt staff at partner fuel stations were not charging specialists and could not be given full dashboard access.
- 03The operator could not tell a genuine hardware failure from a vehicle that had simply refused the handshake, so both were dispatched identically.
- 04Uptime commitments to fuel-retail partners could not be substantiated with any record.
The approach
What was actually done
Each step names the mechanism rather than the outcome, so you can judge whether it would transfer to your situation.
A triage ladder before any dispatch
Availability change, soft reset, hard reset and connector unlock were made available from the charger page, in a fixed order, with the charger’s response recorded at each step. A van is booked only after the ladder is exhausted and diagnostics have been pulled.
Decoded faults instead of vendor codes
OCPP error codes were mapped to readable descriptions and grouped by repetition, which made it possible to distinguish a failing contactor from a run of vehicle handshake failures on one car model.
Scoped access for forecourt staff
Station groups gave staff at each fuel station operate-level access to the chargers on their own forecourt and nothing else — enough to restart a unit and clear a bay, with everything they did recorded.
Uptime measured per connector
Availability was measured at the connector rather than the charger, with maintenance windows excluded, so each fuel-retail partner could be given a substantiated monthly figure with the outage list attached.
The outcome
What changed
- A large share of incidents now close remotely, without a site visit.
- Technicians travel with a diagnosis and the likely part, rather than to investigate.
- Site partners receive an uptime report they can check, which changed the tone of contract renewals.
- Repeat-fault grouping identified one charger model whose failures clustered in monsoon months, informing the next procurement round.
Platform
What was used
Remote diagnostics & OTA
Pull logs, read diagnostics, push firmware and clear faults remotely — so a truck roll is the last resort, not the first.
Uptime & incident management
Connectivity monitoring, fault grouping and uptime reporting per charger, per site and per contract.
Roles & access control
Role-based access for your staff, station groups for territory restrictions, and an audit trail for everything that changes.
Charger management
Register chargers, watch them connect over OCPP, and drive them remotely — start, stop, unlock, reset, reconfigure.
Would the same approach work for you?
Tell us your constraints and we will say honestly which parts of this transfer and which do not.