Release Notes: January 2025 Product Update

In this new series "Release Notes", our CEO, Dr.  Stefan Furlan will periodically drop into the blog with the the latest updates on the product.

Welcome to a new addition to the blog, where I will share a bit about our product, highlight some recent new features, and maybe tease you a little about what’s to come. 

By the way, I won’t be sharing any screenshots, as the evolution of these new features is moving very quickly, but I’d be more than happy to show you; just get in touch or book a demo. 

Custom Data

A cornerstone of our product strategy has always been to support the data that is important to our clients; it’s what makes their offerings unique and what supports their business model and goals. We’ve always believed in going beyond the generic, black-box data you might find locked in a product and offering an open data model. 

For many of our customers, having data is not the issue; it’s having the UI, tools, models, and insights our product provides to enable non-data geeks and techies - their business users in sales and planning - to make decisions. 

Recently, we have been taking this further as we strive to make not just the insights available to business users without needing technical skills, but we have also been building the ability to enable business users to upload and ingest custom data through a simple wizard, using industry-standard formats, like GeoJSON, GeoPackage or Shapefile.

Aside from the location data, it also includes the ability to import all the vital metadata that will appear in the UI (as a tooltip), and this release includes various options for how that data is rendered.

We call this “Data Upload,” and the initial release is available to all customers. 

Find Locations

In a continued theme of streamlining the workflow of discovering and evaluating sites, we have introduced an incredibly sophisticated yet simple-to-use feature that enables the business user to find suitable locations across a wide area quickly.

The user can choose from a set of variables, rules, and data points, from the risk of flooding, competition, and distance from highways and major roads to the proximity of power and points of interest, to automatically survey a wide area to find sites using a set of criteria unique to their business and suitable for their specific equipment and business model.

This is the first release of this innovative new feature. We are adding new features to it during Q1, and it is being quickly rolled out across geographies; initially, it is only available in the UK.  

Performance & UI Improvements

Talking about performance improvements is not as sexy as releasing new features, but the feature I just discussed, which I am very excited by, “Find Locations”, is way more helpful for our clients as, due to enhancements we dropped in January, the maps render incredibly fast. This makes it possible to seamlessly review locations across a very wide area, which speeds up the process of evaluating sites and narrowing down where the planner can best focus.

Aside from the improvements to the platform’s rendering performance (helping clients to get the job done faster as the product is simply faster), we have been paying attention to how our customers use the product and make various tweaks. 

As we (and our clients) discover the regular tasks and how their processes flow, we have made various improvements to the user experience, with a fresh new sidebar and the movement of some buttons to fit how our clients work.  

New Data Packages

As I mentioned above, we believe that the future of Charge Point Planning lies in platforms like ours being very open to clients being able to add their own custom and local data, like any enterprise solution. 

However, we continue to invest in building out the core data that clients get as part of the product and various new data packages coming on stream this year for both the US and UK markets.  And if you have a specific need, I’d encourage you to chat with our sales team or contact me.

No screenshots? Why not book a demo?

As I said at the beginning, I won’t be sharing screenshots this time around, but I would be delighted to show you and would be happy to do this in a quick 15-minute demo or we can go a bit deeper with a workshop with one of our experts.