FLEXeCHARGE Product News: September 2024 Updates

Yeah, my name is Nicholas. I'm technical sales manager at FLEXECHARGE. And today, the two of us will introduce you to two new exciting features and extensions to our HARMON-E platform. Before we dive into the details of it, let me just say the overarching theme of both these is improving your uptime and making sure that the charging network runs smoothly and the user experience of your drivers is perfect. So let's start with the first one, Harmony Alerts. The purpose of Harmony Alerts is to set up custom alerts for active monitoring of your charging network with the purpose of enhancing efficiency and responsiveness. Now, Nikola, one of the reasons you're here today is to shed some light on why we started looking at this functionality and why we believe it's so important. Can you tell us a little bit about the motivation behind Harmony Alerts, please? Yes, I will certainly do that. So my name is Nikola and I'm product manager at FLEXECHARGE, as Nikola said. The reason why we conceptualize alerts is because we want you to be at the top of your game. We want you to be notified if there is something off with your charging stations so you can actually be notified via email or directly in the HARMON-E platform. So by enabling alerts, then you're always kept in the loop. And we want you to be at the top of your game. And that's why from a product manager perspective, we conceptualize this product. Perfect. So to make sure you understand what this is about, I will give you a quick tour of how this works. For that, we will open up our Harmony platform. Some of you will see it for the first time today. For those who are already customers of ours, this should be not too unfamiliar. So what we're seeing here right now is the main login for your site overview. Now on the right hand side, we have a notifications panel where you can review the notifications that the system has sent to you. Now if you haven't set up any custom alerts yet, then you might start with manage alerts. I've did a bit of tweaking before. So here you already see two of those custom alerts that we have configured. Now if I want to set up a new one, I click on the button. And the first thing I do is choosing which object I want to set the alert to. So there's various options. You can select a battery if it's installed on site. You can select the charging stations, power meter, or on the site level. Now let's go for the site to start with. Our functionality only works if we decide which trigger we want to be informed on. So here we have pre-configured a few that we know are quite interesting for operators to use. You can see here, for example, offline for 15 minutes, in warning state for 15 minutes, error state for 15 minutes, and so forth. Now for the purpose of this example, I will decide that I'm most interested in the site being offline for 15 minutes or more. And hence I would like to be informed. So I will give this alert a name, the 15 minute site offline. Now you have the option to either select all of your sites, quite simple, select all, or you decide on individual sites because you might know that there have been some issues in the past and you would like to be highlighted, you would like to be informed specifically on a particular set. So we save the list. As a final step, we only have to choose the notification channel. So is it enough if the portal informs us via the notification bar on the right side, or do we want to receive an email as well? Now for today's example, I would like to see an email as well. I save my alert and it gets added to my list of alerts. Now this is as simple as it is, to be fair. We have quite a few options in total. Nicola, I believe it's more than 10 different configurations that we can set up. That's correct, indeed. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, so if you want to learn more about this, don't hesitate to reach out. If you are already utilizing Harmony, you will be very pleased to know that this is part of the standard functionality. So this is available as of now. If you haven't found it yet, I hope it should be easier from today on. And if you have any questions, just feel free to type them in the chat as well. So we can tackle them right away. Perfect. Yes, please do that. We've got enough time today for answering your questions, if you have any. All right, before we move on, I'm just going to show you also what kind of an alert, how an alert looks like if it reaches your inbox. So one second, please. Let's say the situation has occurred and a site was offline for 15 minutes as I just configured the alert. Then it will trigger an email to be sent to your inbox with the information what the alert is about. So what was the original configuration of the alert? It will highlight which system this applies to or which site in this case. And by clicking on the Turquoise button here in the middle, go to configuration, from the email you will be directed straight to the respective site which this alert was associated with. So we want to make it as easy as possible for you to quickly do the troubleshooting and potentially fix whatever has to be fixed. And on the right side here, you can see the mobile optimized version which would apply if you receive it on your mobile phone. So this would be it for the alerts for now. Is there anything else we should add, Nicola, before we move on to charging analytics? Yes, there is actually one question from Vauter from the chat, which is how many alerts are sending if site is long time offline? Alright, so he's asking for the amount of notifications if a prolonged period of offline activity occurs. Correct. I can answer that question, maybe, Nicola. So I think the system will be triggered every 15 minutes. So every 15 minutes you will receive an alert if the site is long time offline, basically. Because the system will keep shooting because it's going to check every 15 minutes. So I hope that answers your question. Very good. But I actually do remember we have maybe one thing we didn't highlight. So let me come back because this perfectly plays into the question that Vauter asks. Vauter, there is a option where you can actually configure the timeline in which you receive those notifications. So let's say outside of certain office hours in the middle of the night you are not interested in receiving 15 minute interval notifications, then you can select here the period in which those notifications should be sent and in which those notifications should not be sent. I think this would make it easier for your inbox, most likely. All right. Do we have another question from the audience? No, just Vauter saying, okay, that's better with spamming. Yeah, better more alerts than no alerts. I do agree. Yeah. All right. Well, we're giving the option to set this up as you like, Vauter, so you have full freedom on these configurations. All right. If there's nothing more on alerts for now, then I would say let's take a look at the extension charging analytics, which we brought today. So just a few words on this before we deep dive. Charging analytics is a Grafana based extension to Harmony with the purpose of visualizing operational data generated on charging hubs. The most typical users of charging analytics are operations teams of the charge point operators and the solution providers. Let's quickly revisit how it came to be, Nikola. What was the motivation behind us offering charging analytics to our customers? Yes, that's actually a good question, Nikola. That's something that we gave a lot of thoughts into it, let's say. So with the alerts functionality from a customer, but also with the functionality of the service and the functionality of the service, you actually get notified if something is off. But obviously you don't just want to be notified. You want to know more. You want to identify actually what's at the core of the problem. You want to see if it's actually an anomaly or if it's a trend. So by Grafana, actually by using charging analytics, sorry, the extended Grafana solution, then you can actually identify trends and anomalies and deep dive into the actual error. So we want to provide you with actually more analytics to better understand what's going on at the site. All right. And I think that's highly valuable, especially for organizations that have a strong focus on uptime and quality assurance. And I have to say we have been overwhelmed by the positive feedback we got initially. Correct. When we first shared the idea. And so we are very excited to show you what we have conceptualized here. So basically what you get is a high resolution view of various data points that your site is generating. If we go from the top down, you can see a tile here on charge point states. So this refers to all CPP states that are sent by the charging stations. You can see how much the load management has allocated in terms of charge current. Again, very important if you, for example, need to analyze if a charging station is behaving as expected. We have things like actual power import. So how much power did the charging station use over a certain time? And it goes even further with total actual energy that has been reported by the internal meter of the charging stations. And we go towards connectivity topics such as the connection to the backend or the charge point management system. Also giving you feedback. Does the charger still report back to the flexi charge broker? And of course, if you have installed a power meter for dynamic load management, then you will get some really cool data on the consumption on the whole site. So this helps a lot in analyzing sites utilization. It's quite supportive of decision making processes. If you want to extend the site either by new charge points or if you want to talk about getting a new transformer, because maybe the charging utilization requires an upgrade to the grid. So we want to make it as easy and simple as possible for you to get that data from charging analytics. Now, how does this generally work? So I think Nicola gave a quite good intro there already. Assuming you have a situation where an alert has fired up, you get notified about an issue and you want to dig a bit deeper. Your next step would be to jump on to the charging analytics dashboard and select the time frame in which this has occurred. So right now I'm displaying data from the last seven days, but I can opt for any time frame that I would prefer and see what has been going on. So, for example, if I reduce it now to the last hour, I can then see what we call time resolved data. So basically, vertically, you can always see exactly the charge point state, the associated allocated power by the load management, the actual power import at that time, and so forth. So we provide you with the necessary context of analyzing the individual data points together. All right, before we go further, do we get any questions from the audience yet? No questions from the audience, Nicola, so I think you have been very clear so far. Thank you. All right, Nicola, is there anything that you believe we should highlight on this as of now? Because I think for those people who are using or who are in operations, they might have some great ideas on how to perfectly apply this in their operations. I think maybe one additional comments. You can also download the raw data if you want to have the data in your own database. So actually at the top right, there is an option where you can actually share and export your data in, I believe, XML and JSON format. So that's also available. All right, so we make it again, quite easy to transfer the data into third party systems. Quite handy indeed. All right. Well, unless we have anyone with specific questions from the audience, I believe we are coming to a close. Exactly. Maybe another comment from my side. If you want to know more information about either alerts or charging analytics, just visit our website. In the website, there are brochures available for download and then you can actually hear more and read more about the solution. Perfect. I think we're going to send a summary of today and some backup information to the people who have signed up and who have been part of today's webinar anyway. But yes, indeed. Please reach out if you want to get a specific demo or if you're interested to get this activated for your own charging network. So thank you very much for attending our very first product news and wish you all a very lovely rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.