Electrification of your fleet to reach your sustainability goals

With the trend of city centric businesses, there is a high pressure to electrify fleets. Fleet operations can be the largest CO2 contributor of a business, and are therefore important to change. The pressure to transform vehicle fleets is even stronger for companies whose business models focus on providing sustainable products or services or face increased sustainability expectations from clients.

It is a challenge to any fleet to do the transition without the loss of contracts, increasing costs or decreasing productivity. Companies tried to transition 1:1 from ICE (Internal combustion engine) to EV (Electric vehicles) and failed due to payload and capacity issues, focusing on the vehicles too much.

• Companies failed on model selection due to inconsistent setups and involvement of too many people.
• Due to smaller vans and less space in these vehicles, productivity gets impacted when spare parts are missing in the van.
• About half of fleet managers and fleet drivers say that charging on the go is still a concern.

Research revealed that fleets and drivers feel excited and proud about the prospect of an electric fleet and the positive impact switching will have on the environment. Many fleet managers expect to switch to EVs within the next two years. So introducing an EV sustainable fleet to your customer base, will be a new standard, while keeping equal productivity and costs.

The goal should be to transition your service process to support your ‘Business efficiency’ not ‘Fleet efficiency’.

Whilst rightsizing and electrifying an LCV fleet pays obvious environmental and CO2 emissions dividends, there are some challenges in maintaining workflow productivity as the payload becomes smaller. Equipment and spares that were easily carried in a larger vehicle are now struggling to find space in the smaller vehicle.

To simplify the transition process to EV, you need to overcome questions about stock storage, user engagement and charging infrastructure.

• Analyze stock and your workflow – It is always the best to engage the users. The stock they need to carry and their daily workflows can then be analyzed together.

• Standardisation – Standardisation of your van fleet and van solution can also support a faster transition into EV fleet. This is applicable for a global context while still keeping national flexibility.

• Choose the right EV – When choosing the electric vehicle, the goal should be to improve or sustain your performance in terms of employee productivity and revenue generation. Those organisations who are moving successfully to fleet electrification share a common approach: a focus on their core service processes and not primarily the vehicle!

• Decide how you’ll charge them – Your choice of charging solutions depends on where your vehicles spend their off-duty time. Some options are at-home charging, centralized charging at a depot or public charging.

Sortimo offers consultation to review your current status moving into EV, working together with you and a small group of your stakeholders.

Sortimo already has one of the biggest European fleet of EV vehicles as their customer with over 1000 vehicles to be upfitted within a year.

Sortimo’s infrastructure is prepared and has implemented four 16kw charging points at our Warrington Conversion Centre with an additional three at our Oldbury site. 2 charging points are available per station which allows 14 vehicles to be charged at the same time.

We know what is important for EV vehicles and can share this experience with you.

Do you still have questions about electrification and want to get in contact? Our Sortimo team will be happy to help you. You can find all contacts at: mySortimo.co.uk/contact

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