Every charging project has two go-live dates: the day the electrician signs off the installation, and the day the charger actually serves a paying session. On well-run projects those are the same day. On the other kind, the gap is weeks of "it's installed but not talking to the backend", contractors and platform teams blaming each other by email, and site hosts asking why the ribbon-cutting photo shows a charger wrapped in a bin bag.
Commissioning — the process that turns mounted hardware into an operated asset — is where that gap lives. Here's how to industrialise it.
Why commissioning goes wrong
The failure pattern is remarkably consistent across operators and hardware brands:
- Configuration on-site, from scratch. An installer typing a backend URL, charge point ID and APN into a vendor app in a windy car park is a typo generator. Every field entered manually on-site is a support ticket waiting to be raised.
- Split responsibilities, no shared truth. The electrical contractor says the charger is fine; the platform team sees nothing connecting; the SIM provider sees no data session. Three dashboards, no shared picture, days lost to triangulation.
- "Connected" mistaken for "done". The charger boots and goes green — and three weeks later the first driver discovers the RFID reader was never tested, the tariff is wrong, or connector two was never plugged into anything.
- No evidence at handover. Six months later a dispute arises about when a charger actually became operational. Without commissioning records, it's memory against memory.
Each of these is a process defect, not a hardware one — which is good news, because process defects are fixable in software.
The playbook
1. Pre-stage everything that doesn't need a site visit. Before hardware ships, the platform should already know each charger: identity registered, site assigned, configuration profile prepared (backend URL, security profile, APN, tariff, connector layout). Where vendors support it, chargers can be factory- or warehouse-provisioned so they arrive knowing where home is. The site visit then verifies configuration instead of creating it — a profoundly different error profile. (Schema-validated config profiles exist precisely so a device can't receive settings that don't fit its model.)
2. Give installers a guided flow, not a checklist PDF. The installer on site is an electrical professional, not an OCPP specialist — the tooling should meet them there. Scan the charger's serial, see its expected site and configuration, follow a stepped flow: power on → connects → each connector test-charged → RFID tested → photos taken. Green ticks or a specific error with a specific next step. That's the entire design brief for our Installer App, and the difference it makes to first-visit success rates is the difference between a rollout schedule and a rollout hope.
3. Define "commissioned" as passed acceptance, not connected. Write the acceptance criteria down and make the platform enforce them. A reasonable minimum:
- Boot notification received; firmware version recorded and current
- Heartbeats stable for a defined soak period
- Every connector completes a real test charge with plausible meter values
- Authorisation tested (RFID / app / contactless as applicable)
- Tariff verified against the site's intended pricing
- Location coordinates and photos captured
A charger is commissioned when the list is green — and not before. Publicly listing a charger (and regulatory data feeds) should key off this state, so half-configured hardware never appears on a driver's map.
4. Capture the evidence as a by-product. If the guided flow records each step — who, when, test session IDs, photos — then the commissioning certificate writes itself: per-charger, timestamped, exportable. Contract milestones, warranty start dates and "when did this go live?" disputes all resolve by lookup instead of argument.
5. Watch the first fortnight like a canary. Newly commissioned chargers deserve elevated monitoring — tighter heartbeat alerting, first-sessions review, early behavioural baselines. Most installation defects that survive acceptance (marginal cellular signal, an intermittent RCD, a cable route that pools water) reveal themselves in the first two weeks. Treat that window the way you'd treat a firmware canary cohort: watched.
The metric that tells you it's working
One number summarises commissioning health: first-visit completion rate — the share of chargers fully commissioned in a single site visit. Every point below 100% is a repeat truck roll with a price tag. Operators who move from ad-hoc commissioning to pre-staged, guided, acceptance-gated flows routinely watch this number transform — and with it, the credibility of every rollout schedule they publish.
The deeper point: commissioning isn't the boring bit before operations. It's the moment your asset register, your monitoring baselines and your evidence trail are born. Get it right and everything downstream — uptime, KPIs, disputes — starts from truth instead of guesswork.
AmpNexus pre-stages configuration, guides installers through commissioning and enforces acceptance criteria — see the Installer App and Migration & Onboarding.