Depot charging driver workflow: who plugs in, and when
The returning driver plugs in as part of parking the vehicle, before keys or paperwork, and the yard owns everything after that. The failure most depots actually suffer is not electrical: it is a vehicle that finished charging at one in the morning and sat on the port until six, while the van behind it left at forty percent. That is a process problem, and it is fixed with a rule, a card and a person rather than with more chargers.
Updated 2026-08-20
The rule: plugging in is part of parking, not a separate task
Every workflow that treats charging as a separate errand fails, because it competes with going home. A driver who parks, walks to the office, hands in a scanner and then has to walk back out to a charger will sometimes not walk back out. Reordering the sequence so the connector goes in before the keys come out costs nothing and removes most of the compliance problem in the first week.The corollary is that the charger has to be where the vehicle already parks. A row of chargers at the far end of the yard, requiring a repositioning move, converts a ten-second task into a two-minute one and reintroduces exactly the behaviour you just designed out. If the electrical design and the parking layout disagree, the parking layout wins, because you cannot retrain physics or drivers as cheaply as you can move a pedestal at design stage.
The one o'clock problem: a full vehicle holding a working port
This is the specific failure that gets blamed on the chargers and is almost never the chargers. Run the arithmetic on a normal evening and the scale of it is obvious: a yard can be sitting on forty percent spare port-hours across the night and still have a queue, because the spare hours are attached to the wrong vehicles at the wrong times.There are only three honest fixes. Buy a port for every vehicle, which is the simplest and the most expensive. Have somebody physically move vehicles overnight, which works if there is already a person on site and does not if there is not. Or use managed charging to sequence the row so vehicles finish in the order they leave, which does not free the port but does guarantee that the vehicles rolling first are the ones that got the energy first. That third option is software you very likely already have a licence for, and it is the one most depots have not turned on.Sequencing has a hard limit worth stating plainly: it can reallocate a fixed amount of energy across a fixed number of ports, and it cannot create a port. If two vehicles need a full charge and there is one connector, one of them starts late no matter how good the software is.
Four yard models, and what each one actually costs
One port per vehicle is the model with no process risk and the highest capital cost. It is right when the fleet is small, when dwell is short, or when there is nobody on site overnight to move anything. Shared ports with managed sequencing fits most overnight depots and is what makes the per-port economics work, but it depends on returns being spread across the evening rather than arriving in the same twenty minutes.Attendant repositioning is the model everybody underestimates. It is genuinely effective and it is a recurring labour line for as long as the depot exists. Price it over ten years next to the capital cost of the extra ports before deciding it is the cheap option.
Cable management is a process control, not an accessory
A connector left on the ground gets driven over, filled with water and dragged through whatever is on the yard surface. Moisture in a connector body causes ground-fault trips that present as an electrical fault, which then consumes a service call to establish that the fix was a holster. The retractor is the cheapest maintenance decision available at a depot.The same equipment settles the aisle question. If the cable has to cross a driving lane to reach the vehicle, either the pedestal is on the wrong side or the parking is. Fix it at layout stage. Once the concrete is poured, a cable across a lane becomes a permanent operational risk and a permanent conversation with whoever inspects the site.
The laminated card
Park in a charging bay. Plug in before you leave the vehicle. Push until the latch clicks. Check that the light or the screen shows a session started. If it does not start, try the next port and report the one that failed. Return the connector to its holster if you unplug, never onto the ground.That last line matters more than it looks. Most depots see connectors on the ground because a driver unplugged a finished vehicle to take the port — behaviour you probably want — and then had nowhere obvious to put the connector they removed. Give them a holster and the problem disappears.Include what a driver should do when a port is occupied by a vehicle that is already full, because it will happen nightly and the default behaviour without a rule is to park somewhere else and say nothing.
Where the process breaks: handover, weather and the new driver
Shift handover fails because the outgoing driver assumes the incoming one will plug in and the incoming one assumes it was already done. Name the responsibility explicitly in the handover, in the same sentence as the keys.Weather fails because nobody wants to stand in freezing rain wrestling a cold, stiff cable. That is an argument for covered charging positions on the returns nearest the building, and it is why cold-weather depots see plug-in compliance drop in exactly the months when the vehicles need the most energy.New drivers fail because nobody showed them, and the induction covers the vehicle rather than the yard. Two minutes at the charger on day one is the entire intervention.
Two numbers to report weekly
Plug-in compliance is the share of returning vehicles that started a session within a short window of arrival — fifteen minutes is a reasonable line. Dispatch readiness is the share of vehicles that left at or above the state of charge their route required. When readiness drops and compliance is fine, look at the equipment and the sequencing. When both drop together it is the yard process, and adding chargers will not fix it.Both numbers come from joining vehicle telematics to charger session data, which is the same integration that makes overnight alerting useful. If a charging platform demonstration cannot show you these two numbers, it is a dashboard rather than a tool.
Should drivers plug in, or should a yard attendant do it?
Drivers should plug in at the moment they park, because it is the only version that survives an unstaffed evening. An attendant is still worth having where ports are shared, but the attendant's job is repositioning finished vehicles overnight, not doing the plug-in that the driver walked past.
What do we do when a driver forgets to plug in?
Detect it the same night rather than at dispatch. An alert on any vehicle parked on site for more than fifteen minutes without a session started gives whoever is on the yard time to fix it. If nobody is on the yard the alert is still worth having, because it tells the morning shift which van needs re-planning before the routes go out rather than after.
Do we need one charging port per vehicle?
Not if dwell is long and returns are spread out. Do the arithmetic on your own return times and energy per vehicle before assuming either way. What decides it is whether the last vehicle back still has enough hours before dispatch to take on what its route needs, and how much of the night the earlier vehicles spend sitting full on a working port.
Who moves vehicles overnight if the yard is unstaffed?
Nobody, which means an unstaffed yard should be designed with either a port per vehicle or managed sequencing that prioritises the vehicles leaving first. Choosing shared ports with no sequencing and no overnight staff is the specific combination that produces vans leaving at forty percent.
How do we stop cables getting damaged?
Retractors or overhead reels, a holster within reach of every bay, and a layout where no cable crosses a driving lane. Most cable damage happens to cables lying on the ground, so removing the ground as a resting place removes most of the failures rather than shortening them.