Your e-truck doesn't have a range problem. Your dispatcher has an information problem.

Why fleet electrification changes the planning problem

Ask a transport operator what worries them about their first electric truck, and the answer is usually range. Ask them again eighteen months later, once a handful of e-trucks are actually running, and the answer has changed. Range is manageable. What's hard is planning around it.

A diesel truck is, from a dispatcher's point of view, a simple object. It has a driver, a capacity, and a location. Fuel is effectively an unlimited resource that gets topped up in a few minutes whenever it's convenient. An electric truck is fundamentally different: its usable range changes with the weather, the load and the terrain; "refuelling" takes between forty minutes and several hours; and the "fuel station" is a scarce resource that has to be booked, shared and scheduled.

In other words: electrification doesn't just change the vehicle. It changes the planning problem.

What actually changes for the dispatcher

Let's be concrete about the information a dispatcher needs the moment the fleet goes electric.

1. State of charge and realistic remaining range, in real time. Not the manufacturer's brochure range — the actual, current range of that truck, with that load, in today's weather. A dispatcher assigning the afternoon's orders needs to know whether vehicle 14 can still take the next tour. Without live state-of-charge data flowing into the planning view, every assignment becomes an educated guess, and educated guesses in dispatching are expensive.

2. Depot charging as a plannable, reservable resource. Most operators will do the overwhelming majority of their charging at their own depot, and this is where the real complexity hides. A depot doesn't have unlimited charging capability— it has a specific number of charging points, each with a specific power output, each occupied by a specific vehicle for a specific window. Two trucks sharing a 500 kW station charge at half the speed. That makes depot charging a scheduling problem that looks a lot like dock scheduling — and it needs the same treatment: visibility of availability, and the ability to reserve a charging point for a vehicle at a time. If the dispatcher can't hold a slot, they don't control their own operation.

3. External charging points — with the details that decide whether you can actually use them. Public charging networks are expanding fast, and alongside them a second category is emerging: other transport operators opening their depot infrastructure to third parties, typically at a lower price than public networks. Both are useful. Both are useless if the dispatcher can't see them in the planning tool. And "seeing them" means more than a pin on a map. For a 40-tonne combination, the operationally decisive questions are mundane and specific:

• Can I get in and out with a trailer attached, or do I have to uncouple?
• Where exactly is the plug positioned relative to where the vehicle stands?
• What's the actual power output, and is the point free right now?
• What does it cost?

A charging point that a truck physically cannot reach is not a charging point. This is the kind of detail that separates a workable e-truck operation from a frustrating one, and it belongs in the same master data the dispatcher already works with.

4. Routing that plans the load and the energy at the same time. This is the heart of it. Today, route optimisation answers one question: what is the most cost-efficient way to pick up and deliver this set of shipments? For an electric fleet, that question can't be separated from a second one: where and when does this vehicle charge? Optimising them separately produces bad answers. Plan the tour first and then look for charging stops, and you'll find the tour doesn't allow any. Plan the charging first and you'll build the day around the infrastructure rather than the customer. The two have to be solved together — the tour, the depot charging window before departure, and any external charging stops en route, as a single optimisation. That also raises the bar on energy consumption modelling. A rough kWh-per-kilometre figure is not good enough when the difference between making it and not making it is 8%. Realistic consumption estimation has to account for the elevation profile — climbing a mountain is not the same as crossing a flat— and for outside temperature, which affects both battery performance and cabin heating. A model that ignores a −5 °C morning will send a truck out that can't complete its tour.

Why the TMS, and not another portal

Every one of these capabilities exists somewhere already. Telematics providers know the state of charge. Charge point operators know availability. Charging management systems handle depot infrastructure. Routing engines calculate energy consumption. Booking platforms exist for external infrastructure. So why insist on bringing them together in the TMS?

Because of a simple operational reality: the dispatcher needs one tool to solve the optimization problem globally. The transport management system is where orders arrive, where tours are built, where vehicles and drivers are assigned, where the day gets rescheduled when a customer calls at 10:40 to move a delivery. It is the system of record for what the fleet is doing.

Any information that isn't in that system has to be fetched — by opening another portal, checking another app, calling the workshop. Every one of those context switches costs time, and more importantly, it costs reliability. Information you have to go and look for is information you sometimes don't look for. Under pressure, on a busy morning, dispatchers will fall back on the tool in front of them and guess about the rest.

There's also a structural argument. Charging decisions are not standalone decisions — they're trade-offs against everything else in the plan. Charging vehicle 14 at the depot until 09:30 means it can't take the 08:00 pickup. Adding a charging stop along the way may add 55 minutes and push two deliveries outside their time windows. These are dispatching trade-offs, and they can only be evaluated in the system that holds the orders, the time windows, the driver hours and the customer commitments. Put the charging data next to that, and the dispatcher makes one decision. Put it in a separate tool, and they make two decisions that don't know about each other.

Standards as enablers

The good news is that this integration no longer requires bespoke connections to every charging provider. OCPI (the Open Charge Point Interface) has become the common language between charging networks and the vehicles that use them — covering location data, availability, pricing and, increasingly, reservations. That means a TMS can connect to the charging ecosystem the same way it connects to telematics or ERP systems: through an established interface rather than a one-off project.

Similarly, the routing side is not starting from zero. Energy-aware route optimisation that accounts for topography, temperature and charging stops is an active field, and the algorithmic foundations already exist in some optimisation engines that power modern tour planning.

The work, then, is less about inventing something new and more about connecting the right things in the right place — and making the result usable by a dispatcher who has forty orders to place before lunch.

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If this post resonates with you, don't hesitate to reach out and become part the X4fleet Electrification Pioneers group!