By Alex Buckley, general manager EMEA & APAC at DispatchTrack

Alex Buckley, general manager at DispatchTrack

In a recent study that Shell and Deloitte published on decarbonisation efforts among fleet operators, there was one theme that really broke the noise: decarbonisation is an intimidating prospect for delivery organisations.

Yes, 95% of fleet owners described electric vehicles as their best long-term solution, and 85% said that decarbonisation was a top priority. At the same time, however, many of the fleet owners, managers, and operators surveyed were struggling to navigate new challenges around electrification, separate fact from fiction with regards to EVs, and handle the pressure from new stakeholders who are driving net zero initiatives.

Many if not most of these concerns are valid. EVs, for instance, are an investment, and for that investment to pay off, businesses need to ensure that they have both the IT infrastructure and the physical infrastructure in place to successfully leverage them. They need change management strategies for getting their personnel used to new equipment and new ways of doing things. And, most likely, they need a plan for running EVs and more traditional truck and van fleets in parallel, at least until supply catches up with demand.

To meet net zero commitments in logistics, EVs are ultimately going to be imperative, but to get to the point where they can really make an impact, stakeholders are going to need a lot of education on the specific challenges relating to EV rollouts and how to overcome them. To that end, here’s a rundown of some of the potential routing challenges that despatchers and fleet managers might be thinking about in the coming months, and how to deal with them.

Navigating shorter ranges

Even though average EV ranges have improved significantly in the last 10 years, range was one of the factors in EV routing that seemed to worry a lot of respondents in Deloitte’s study; so much so that nearly a third of respondents actually underestimated the total range of a typical EV. There’s still a perception that EVs aren’t applicable to a wide range of logistics use cases, and that outside of dense city centres they’re simply not as practical.

There’s no doubt that the kinds of limitations on range that come with EVs can be a challenge, but it’s a challenge that can be tackled with the right approach to routing and distribution planning. By mapping out the areas where you expect the most demand to arise for a particular period, you can become more strategic about where you position hubs and warehouses in order to minimise the required amount of travel for any given route. Smart, AI-powered routing techniques already have the power to shorten the distances you’re driving for each stop, so getting more strategic about where your EVs are actually starting those routes can only improve the length you’re able to get from them.

Incorporating charging stops

Of course, one of the other issues that businesses worry about isn’t just the length of a charge, but the logistics of charging itself. Installing charging hardware in distribution centres, warehouses, etc can be a big project, and even once they’re installed, you’ll need a reliable map of other charging stations out in the world.

Route optimisation can present challenges, even before you start thinking about incorporating stops along the route for the vehicle to potentially spend multiple hours charging. At the same time, the same techniques that you need to ensure efficient routing under normal circumstances can still be applied here. You can factor charging stops in after a certain number of miles driven automatically, the way you might factor in necessary breaks at certain intervals along a route. Based on the charger, you can calculate charging time the same way you would calculate service time.

Sure, many businesses will default to doing only as many deliveries as a single charge will carry them. But for businesses that may sometimes need more than that, a sophisticated routing system should help.

Managing hybrid fleets

EV production is certainly starting to pick up steam. That said, supply chain issues mean that there still won’t be enough of them in the immediate future to enable everyone currently running a traditional fleet to fully transition over to electric. That means that one of the keys to success in the interim will be finding a way to manage a hybrid fleet and optimise delivery planning in such a way as to limit emissions.

We shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to decarbonisation. At the same time, managing a hybrid fleet might seem a little tricky. After all, the more variables you add into the planning process, the harder it is to ensure that you’re getting the most efficient possible planning outcomes.

Here, AI may be the best solution. If you can leverage routing technology that enables you to configure different parameters for different truck types and then nearly instantaneously finds the optimal options based on what you’d like to optimise your routes for (eg, the lowest CO2 emissions), handling this kind of hybrid fleet can become like second nature for routers and despatchers.

Tracking decarbonisation milestones 

Many of the challenges that we’ve talked about above are fundamental to new technologies such as EVs. But perhaps the most important challenge to overcome is something much more fundamental: the ability to actually measure what’s happening when you make deliveries.

Luckily, this is just a matter of making sure that your last-mile deliveries are comprehensively tracked and documented. If you’re able to capture a thorough record of how many miles were driven on each delivery run and compare it to the miles that you planned for in the routing stage, you can determine your actual carbon emissions fairly effectively. When you add EVs into the mix, the only additional challenge is configuring different emissions for different vehicle and load types.

As with so many other EV challenges that businesses will face in the coming years, success is all about creating clarity and visibility about what’s actually happening in your delivery network. When you can make that happen, decarbonisation suddenly seems a lot less daunting.