Use of Microsoft Dynamics 365 in public charging stations from ZSE

• In 6 months we created an application supporting public charging of electromobiles.

• The result of our work is a highly flexible CRM system and billing platform.

• We helped the client achieve a 61% growth in use of the services of public charging of electromobiles and a 242% growth in monthly income from use of the nationwide electromobile charging service.

Adapting the business model with innovative technologies is essential nowadays.

Electric cars are one of the new breakthroughs with the greatest impact on infrastructure in the field of transport. Their sale and number is growing and now is the right time to establish a good position on the market.

Public charging stations are the foundation of electromobility. Exe developed a CRM system on the verified platform Microsoft Dynamics 365, which covers the registration and administration of customers, calculates charge values or billing. That is precisely the system we implemented for our client Západoslovenská energetika, a. s.

The main goal of implementation was to address new customers and to automate the billing process for services of public charging of electromobiles. The main requirement was to support the complete end-to-end process from registration of a new client to the generation of PDF bills - all in a single application.

Our solution comprises the data integration of internal and external information systems, custom mobile applications, web applications and the internal ERP system. Data consolidation is secured by bilateral SAP ERP integration. The asynchronous semiautomatic customer verification procedure ensures the quality of customer data, whereby security is covered by the cloud.

Public charging of electromobiles can be used in various ways. Most of them are completely covered by a cloud solution on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.

Natural and legal entities can register over a web interface by mobile, customer service line, or reach us through car vendors, car rentals or roaming partners from abroad.

Our information system is capable of approving all new clients, setting up accounts for them and assigning them a program. Customers receive a charging card and also access to the mobile application. Customers also have support at hand.

We successfully wrestle also with the challenge of charge pricing, for instance. In addition to a simple model of adding up consumed kWh, there are various other combinations with monthly fixed-rate programs. Sometimes a fee is charged if you remain parked after the prescribed charge time. Various revenue share models exist, also with other owners of charging stations, even private ones. A specific price model can appear with roaming contracts.

The company Západoslovenská energetika, a. s. is part of the multinational energy group E.ON. One of the investments of E.ON in the field of electromobility is the Finnish company VIRTA, which provides a complete backend system for the European network of charging stations. We integrated their payment system also into our solution.

Our solution supports a post-paid billing model, including one-off payments by credit card over a mobile application. Charge prices are automatically bound to the prepaid program of customers and billing is done by the product catalogue and selected charging program. We can issue customers with a singular bill per charge, or a monthly itemized bill. We integrated with the SAP system and our information system can be connected to other ERP systems.

A key part of the solution is monitoring and analytics. Which stations are most used and where? What future consumption can we predict on current trends? Similar questions can be answered by the Dynamics system itself, or it can be supplemented by connecting to an analytical tool in the Microsoft Azure cloud service that it runs on. The capacity of this service can be increased at any time and it is charged monthly.

“We needed a platform that could be easily connected to our existing server system, and we only had six months to get it onto market” says Rastislav Žembery, Product Manager for e-mobility. “We quickly evaluated that the best solution for us was Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and so we established cooperation with local experts on Microsoft products, the company exe. For our product portfolio, we are developing many new functionalities and additions, which would definitely not have been possible with other CRM or billing systems.“

This solution produced success. The number of registered users increased by 127% per year, taking ZSE to a milestone of 1,200 subscribed users. Monthly revenues from charging services increased by 242% and the total growth in use of public charging services was 61%.