The press release writes itself. A Fortune 500 company announces a partnership with an OEM to electrify its sales and service fleet. Thousands of vehicles, aggressive timelines, projected fuel savings in the hundreds of thousands annually. The sustainability team gets their win.

Then someone in operations asks: “Where exactly are these vehicles going to charge?“

For depot-based fleets, the answer is straightforward. Trucks return to a central facility, plug in overnight, and leave fully charged. The infrastructure is controlled. The costs are predictable.

But sales and service fleets operate differently. Field technicians drive company vehicles home every night. They park in driveways, apartment garages, and street parking. The vehicle is a company asset, but the charging infrastructure sits at an employee’s private residence, drawing power from their personal utility account.

This is where the real complexity begins.

Three Problems OEM Telematics Won’t Solve

Vehicle OEMs have responded to fleet electrification by bundling charging solutions with their commercial offerings. Buy the trucks, get the telematics, add network access. For depot charging, this integration makes sense. For home charging, it breaks down.

Reimbursement accuracy. When employees charge company vehicles at home, their electricity bills go up. The company needs to reimburse them fairly, which means tracking exactly how much energy went into the company vehicle versus household consumption or a spouse’s personal EV. Getting this wrong creates employee relations problems fast. OEM telematics can see battery level, but cannot attribute energy costs at the household level.

Cost optimization. Electricity costs vary dramatically by time of day. An employee might be on a rate plan where charging at 6 PM costs three times more than charging at midnight. Without smart charging controls at the charger itself, employees plug in whenever they get home, and the company reimburses premium-rate electricity. The fuel savings that justified electrification quietly erode. OEM systems can monitor the vehicle, but they cannot control third-party home chargers or optimize against local utility rates.

Multi-market complexity. A company electrifying fleets across dozens of markets faces different utility structures, grid connection processes, and incentive programs in each one. What works in one country will not work in the next. OEM telematics platforms are built around the vehicle, not around the patchwork of energy markets where those vehicles charge.

The Missing Layer: A Charging Station Management System

The gap is a CSMS (Charging Station Management System) that sits between distributed home chargers and fleet systems, speaking common protocols regardless of charger brand or geographic market.

OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) forms the foundation. Most commercial-grade home chargers support OCPP 1.6J or newer, which means a single backend can manage diverse hardware across multiple countries. Smart charging profiles shift sessions to off-peak hours. Detailed session data feeds accurate reimbursement calculations. Remote diagnostics catch problems before they impact operations.

But modern fleet deployments often need capabilities beyond basic OCPP. ISO 15118 enables Plug and Charge authentication, eliminating the need for RFID cards at home installations. OpenADR connects the CSMS to utility demand response programs, allowing the fleet to participate in grid balancing and earn revenue for flexibility. For large fleets, several thousand vehicles with Level 2 chargers represents significant flexible load that grid operators will pay to control.

A well-architected CSMS supports OCPP 1.6J, 2.0.1, and 2.1 simultaneously, accommodating the mixed hardware that results from multi-year rollouts across different markets.

The Business Case

Fleet electrification for take-home vehicles delivers substantial savings only if the charging infrastructure is managed well.

Smart charging optimization protects the fuel cost advantage that justifies electrification. Automated reimbursement reduces administrative overhead and keeps employees satisfied. Demand response participation generates incremental revenue. And detailed charging data supports the sustainability reporting that customers and investors increasingly demand.

The organizations that get decentralized fleet charging right will capture the full value of electrification. The complexity is real, but so are the solutions.