From understanding your business requirements to identifying every stakeholder, what should a robust electrification plan include?
Successfully switching your fleet to electric vehicles can take time. Often, electrification is a long-term process. It requires careful planning, and various factors and stakeholders need to be considered.
Many businesses are already on this journey, with a clear plan in place. Regardless of the progress you may have made, the ever-evolving landscape and rapidly advancing technology mean that your strategy should be continuously reviewed.
In this article, we outline ways to develop a robust electrification plan, highlighting the key considerations based on Audi’s experience supporting businesses on this journey.
First, it is important to gain visibility of your requirements. This can be broken down into three areas:
1. Review your fleet
Any decision regarding the future of your fleet should ideally begin by assessing your current vehicles.
Understanding the age, mileage, running costs, SMR (Service, Maintenance and Repair) costs and each vehicle’s use is crucial. As a fleet decision-maker, you may have some – if not all – of this information to hand or available in your fleet management system.
Regardless, obtaining this data can provide a firm foundation from which you can make decisions about the vehicles you could electrify first.
If this is proving to be a challenge, you could explore fleet management software providers, which can offer this visibility.
2. Assess vehicle use cases
It is then time to assess the vehicle use case for your drivers – or each group of drivers.
Is your fleet made up of job-need vehicles that cover a high number of miles, require a certain boot capacity or meet a specific operational need? Or are these vehicles provided as an employment benefit, where the driver has a choice over which vehicle they drive? Or is it a combination of the two?
The answer will give you clarity of the business requirements that your electrification plan will need to meet.
3. Understand organisational goals
Factoring in wider organisational goals into your plan is the third key strand. This may include aligning with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) objectives and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies, given the role that your fleet could play in helping to achieve these.
To truly understand your organisational goals, you will also need a clear view of your business’s future requirements.
How much growth is expected and how might this affect your fleet of vehicles? How might vehicle use case evolve in line with any changes to the business model? How could hybrid working continue to impact the movement of people within the business?
With answers to these questions, you can start to future-proof your plan.
The transition to electric vehicles has the potential to impact stakeholders across your business, which is why gaining their buy-in is vital.
Recognising any issues, concerns and potential resistance to electrification – and factoring these into your plan – could prove key to achieving a smooth transition.
So, who might these stakeholders be?
First, let us start with those you may already engage with. This includes drivers, the Human Resources (HR) and Finance departments and the Senior Management Team (SMT).
However, given electrification is changing the role of the fleet manager, it is likely that the number of stakeholders you interact with will increase, if it has not already.
You could find yourself working closely with colleagues responsible for sustainability and meeting the organisation’s ESG objectives. Or you may need to align with the facilities team, to understand planning restrictions before implementing workplace charging.
External stakeholders can also come into play. Collaborating with energy suppliers or regional Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) to ensure your site has the right power supply and capacity is common.
Regardless of the stakeholders you encounter, understanding the impact of electrification on each party and their specific requirements is essential.
Doing so will put you in a position to engage and communicate with them at each stage of your planning process – and in time, deliver a strategy that suits everyone.
With a picture of your current and future requirements, and your stakeholders mapped out, you are well-placed to create a clear plan to proceed.
While your business case will be unique to your organisation, the following points are relevant to most:
Scope: what does your business case include? The vehicles alone? Or will it incorporate workplace charging and energy supply?
Roadmap: given the timescales involved, what does the proposed timeline for your transition look like?
Goals: what might electrification achieve and how will it contribute to your organisation’s key objectives?
Financial analysis: what is the initial investment required to start this transition? Generally, businesses make decisions regarding electric vehicles by considering Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This is because electric vehicles typically have higher upfront costs but can be less expensive to run, operating a different cost profile to ICE vehicles. So, how do different powertrains compare from a cost perspective when considering each vehicle’s use case? We will explore TCO in detail in due course.
Stakeholder analysis: have all internal and external stakeholders been considered? How does your electrification plan meet their requirements?
As we have explained in this article, there are many factors to consider when developing a plan for your electrification.
While you may already have this plan in place and are advancing towards electrification, the accelerating pace of change in this sector could mean that your plans need to change too.
Therefore, regularly reviewing your requirements and understanding what has evolved since your business started this journey is vital.
“Regularly reviewing your requirements and understanding what has evolved since your business started this journey is vital.”
We would be delighted to hear your feedback on this article and welcome any suggestions you have for topics that you would like Audi to explore in future.