What is a back office?
A back office is a cloud-based platform used to remotely manage, monitor and control charging stations.
It is also referred to as a Charging Station Management System or CSMS.
Key Functionalities
Remote Management: Operators can see in real-time if a charger is online, offline, or in use. It also allows you to reboot chargers remotely or push firmware updates.
Access Control: You decide who is allowed to charge (e.g., via RFID charge cards, key fobs, or app scans) and can manage different user groups.
Billing & Reimbursement: The system tracks the exact amount of electricity consumed. This allows for automated billing to public users or automatic expense reimbursement for employees who charge their company cars at home.
Tariff Management: Owners can set dynamic or fixed pricing models, such as different rates for peak hours, off-peak hours, or public vs. private users.
Smart Charging & Load Balancing: The software optimizes power distribution across multiple chargers to prevent overloading the building's electrical grid, or shifts charging to times when electricity is cheapest or greenest.
Analytics & Reporting: Provides dashboards with data on energy usage, station occupancy, revenue, and the overall health of the charging network.
Diagnostics & Maintenance: If a technical fault occurs, the system automatically sends alerts to the operator or maintenance technician.
Communication
Charging stations communicate with a back office using OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol).
OCPP is an open-source language.
You can find the commands used in OCPP in the documentation from the Open Charge Alliance (OCA)
Next to that, Alfen provides its additional 'Backoffice configuration keys' with each firmware release.
Connecting to a back office
Connect charger to internet
Alfen chargers can connect via Mobile internet, wired internet or wifi, depending on the charger model, hardware and firmware.
In the chargers configuration, we must select the back office the charger needs to connect to.
This depends on the provider selected or used by the Chargepoint operator.
Alfen chargers hold an extensive list of pre-programmed back offices that make setting up a connection easy!
Simply select the correct Back office preset!
In case the back office of your choice is not listed, select the manual settings and enter the info received from the back office partner.
After the charger is powered on, the charger will start to build a connection to the configfured back office using the available and configured method(s).
When a route to the back office is found, the charger will request access using the Chargepoint ID.
The Chargepoint ID MUST match with the ID that is expected by the back office.
Access for the charger to the back office is only granted when a match is found
Therefore, be very carefull in changing the chargepoint ID in the charger as it may result in losing the connection to the back office!