Executive Summary
As EV charging networks expand across fleets, public corridors, and dense urban hubs, reliability has become a defining constraint on growth. While hardware, software platforms, and open standards continue to evolve, operators across the industry report that the most persistent challenges are operational: seeing problems early, resolving them efficiently, coordinating field work, and scaling without losing control.
This paper synthesizes insights from operators, service providers, OEMs, and CSMS vendors to examine why operating EV charging infrastructure has been difficult, and what it takes to do it well at scale. It focuses on four recurring operational pain clusters:
- Limited observability beyond basic uptime
- Unclear ownership and shallow diagnostics during issue resolution
- Inefficient and costly field dispatches
- Difficulty scaling operations without linear increases in headcount and complexity
Together, these challenges explain why many charging networks have struggled not with installation, but with day-to-day dependability. This paper outlines the operational jobs to be done, and the systems required to support them, to move from reactive maintenance to engineered, proactive, repeatable operations.
The Hidden Complexity of Operating EV Charging Networks
From the outside, EV charging appears straightforward: deploy chargers, connect vehicles, collect revenue. In practice, operating a network reliably involves coordinating hardware, software, power, connectivity, people, and partners, often across dozens of vendors and geographies.
Across the industry, operators consistently report the same friction points:
- Fragmented tools and partial visibility
- Slow, ambiguous issue resolution
- Costly, repeat truck rolls
- Operational stress as networks grow
These issues are not edge cases. They are systemic, and they compound as networks scale.
Observability: Why “Up / Down” Monitoring Isn’t Enough
Most charging networks rely on monitoring systems designed primarily for billing and driver experience. These systems often report whether a charger is online, offline, or delivering sessions, but miss early indicators of failure.
In reality, performance degradation often appears long before a charger goes offline:
- Power output slowly derates
- Session failures increase gradually
- Intermittent connectivity disrupts charging
- Payment or authentication fails under specific conditions
Operators need observability that answers operational questions, not just technical ones:
- Which sites are at risk today?
- Where is performance drifting over time?
- Which assets cause a disproportionate share of failures?
- Which failures matter most, and which can I actually control?
Effective observability is not about more data, it’s about the right actionable signals: surfacing the small number of issues that require attention before drivers, fleets, or customers feel the impact.
Issue Resolution: When Ownership Is Unclear, Downtime Grows
Once a problem is detected, the next challenge is resolution, and this is where many organizations stall.
Beyond its inherent technical complexity, a single incident may involve:
- A CPO accountable to customers
- A CSMS managing sessions and payments
- An OEM holding diagnostics and warranty terms
- A service provider performing field work
Each party holds part of the picture, acting in good faith, but shaped by their own priorities. Rarely does anyone hold all of it.
Without structured diagnostics and clear workflows, teams struggle to answer basic questions:
- What is the most likely root cause?
- Who owns the next action?
- What should be tried remotely versus on site?
- How was this issue previously resolved?
The result is slow Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), repeated escalations, and unresolved accountability. Effective resolution requires not only diagnostics that are contextual, repeatable, and tied directly to action, but also shared knowledge and clear accountability.
Field Dispatch: Evolving Away from Blind Truck Rolls
Field interventions are among the most expensive elements of EV charging operations. Yet many dispatches still occur with limited preparation.
Common symptoms include:
- Technicians arriving without full diagnostic context
- Missing parts
- Unclear task definitions
- Unavailable or inappropriate remote assistance
Before dispatching a technician, operators need confidence that:
- A site visit is truly required
- The job is clearly defined
- The right parts and skills are allocated
- Evidence collection is structured and consistent
High-performing teams treat dispatch as a designed process, not a reactive response, aiming to resolve issues in a single visit whenever possible.
Scaling Operations Without Losing Control
As networks grow from dozens to hundreds or thousands of sites, operational complexity increases faster than charger counts.
Organizations commonly encounter:
- Tool sprawl across CSMSs, OEM portals, ticketing systems, and spreadsheets
- Unwritten knowledge trapped in individuals
- Manual, time-consuming data entry and reporting
- Confusion due to fragmented communication and competing sources of truth
Scaling successfully requires more than hiring. It requires standardized processes, shared data models, and systems that support growth without multiplying effort.
At scale, the operational jobs shift from incident response to system management:
- Standardizing how issues are defined and resolved
- Measuring performance automatically and consistently
- Designing workflows that absorb growth without breaking
Confidence as the Real Outcome
Ultimately, operational maturity delivers confidence:
- Confidence to sign and meet SLAs
- Confidence to expand into new regions
- Confidence to answer reliability questions with data, not anecdotes
Reliable charging infrastructure is not achieved through heroics. It is built through visibility, ownership, coordination, and learning, repeated consistently across networks and partners.
Conclusion: Engineering Operations as Infrastructure
The EV charging industry has made enormous progress in hardware, software platforms, and open standards. The next frontier is operational infrastructure: the systems, workflows, and practices that turn installed chargers into dependable services.
Observability, issue resolution, field execution, and scalability are not separate problems. They are parts of a single operational system, one that must be intentionally designed, measured, and improved over time.
As networks continue to grow, the operators who succeed will be those who treat operations not as a cost center, but as critical infrastructure, engineered with the same rigor as the chargers themselves.
About This Paper
This white paper is informed by direct conversations with charging operators, service providers, OEMs, and software platforms operating real networks across North America. It reflects recurring patterns observed across public charging, fleets, and managed services environments.
About Relion
Relion is a Canadian technology company that delivers end-to-end Operations & Maintenance (O&M) software for EV charging infrastructure. Our platform gives charge point operators, fleets, and service providers complete visibility and control over their networks, from issue detection to resolution. With unified workflows for diagnostics, work orders, and field coordination, Relion simplifies day-to-day operations, improves continuity, and helps customers keep their chargers performing without compromise.
