Boost Productivity and Profit by Using a Battery Management System

Battery washing, watering, equalizing, and rotating aren’t enough: Why tactical and strategic capabilities are needed to optimize motive

equipment, their batteries, chargers, and operators

s savvy warehouse and logistics managers aim to boost the bottom line, more are turning to battery management systems as a tool to help

avoid pre-mature battery failure, underperformance, or both. But not all systems are created equal.

An advanced battery management system can immediately reduce the required number of forklift, pallet truck, or AGV batteries by up to 50%. This decrease in the number of batteries minimizes the overall cost of charging and maintaining batteries by 25% or more.

The system can also boost staff productivity. Changing batteries at the proper

time rather than during peak periods, like shift changes, can add an extra 30 minutes or more of productive work per forklift each day. The money saved by increasing the efficiency of the floor operations and the reduction in maintenance and charging costs can result in an ROI (on the purchase of the management system) in as little as nine months.

Systems that simply prompt battery rotation, washing, watering and equalizing are not enough. While important, these tactical concerns are not the whole story, but only a beginning.

To truly realize savings in battery management, both tactical and strategic plans are needed. Like the unseen bulk of

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an iceberg beneath the surface, there is a mass of information that is available and must be presented and analyzed to optimize motive equipment, batteries, chargers, and operator performance. Without a way to collect the data available, operations managers are as clueless to the conditions concerning their motive battery assets as the captain of the Titanic was to his hazard. Here are some tips helping everyone from operators in the battery room to logistics managers in corporate offices get the most out of a warehouse battery management system.

Ability to Answer All Stakeholder Questions Operators and maintenance supervisors need only tactical information such as: When does a battery need to be watered, washed, or equalized? Which battery is next in rotation to be placed in a lift truck?

Which batteries, chargers, or forklifts are underperforming and need further evaluation? Facilities managers will ask more strategic questions: Does my battery inventory meet my forklift energy needs? Do I have excess battery inventory? Are my batteries lasting as long as they should? How do I document battery warranty claims? Are my batteries maintained properly?

Corporate Executives will need even more information to fully analyze their assets at various levels, in multiple facilities: How is one facility performing compared to another? Do I have adequate or excess assets (at one facility vs. another)? How can I best allocate my assets? If one facility performs better, why? Can we employ best practices to all facilities?

To adequately answer the questions for each of these various managers, it’s essential to choose a battery management system that tracks at least seven basic data points: 1) An asset ID for the lift vehicle 2) An asset ID for each incoming battery 3) An asset ID for each outgoing battery 4) An ID for each individual operator 5) A time stamp for the moment that each battery transaction begins and ends 6) How long each truck ran on each battery, obtained from the hour meter (run-time) 7) The charging location for the outgoing battery

For instance, the EBatt industrial battery management system, developed by Temple, Texas-based Materials Transportation Company (MTC), tracks those seven points of data, each of which is equally important to thoroughly evaluate battery-powered operations. Because this system time-stamps virtually every change of state as a battery is charged, cooled, installed, and used, it provides the key metric of run-time.

“Knowing run-time, or how long a

forklift actually moves or lifts product, is critical since it tells you how much actual work you got out of your battery,” says Terry Orf, Administrative Vice President at MTC. “Clock-time, or how long a battery has been sitting in a forklift, is relatively meaningless unless you have run-time as well.”

Turning Data to Information Pays Off What’s needed is to turn data into useful information. The ability to slice, dice, and interpret data gives managers the visibility into the operations they need to create savings and encourage higher productivity. While some battery asset management systems are limited to as few as a dozen reports, some such as MTC’s offer over 50 standard reports, plus the ability to customize and interpret information with optional executive summaries, operations reviews, and business consulting.

Evaluating battery performance on run-time, for instance, does more than allow organizations to quickly zero in on which batteries may be worn out or simply need to be

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watered. It’s a great overall indicator of how an entire operation is running, especially when coupled with metrics like operator performance.

“Because we collect the timestamp when forklift operators come in for a battery change, we can see if everybody comes in at shift change or throughout the day,” says Orf. “We can see if they’re using the battery change as a break, which can happen if several people line up.”

The solution: “Spread battery changes throughout the day, which minimizes wait time and the number of batteries you need to buy, inventory, charge, and maintain,” says Orf. “Industrial engineers or facilities managers can help achieve this by reviewing a transaction report and specifying that operators only come in for a battery change when the battery is 80% discharged.”

While all battery management systems have good intentions, some have limited ability to help an organization because they offer little information that is useful to management. It is hard to make improvements without reliable information for analysis, context, and direction.

One battery management system, for instance, sounds an alarm if operators in the battery room choose a different battery than the one the system specified. Presumably, a supervisor may come running to correct the operator, but barring this, the operator may simply not know how to respond to that warning. In such cases, it’s better to opt for a system that can walk an operator step-by-step through the battery selection process until he chooses the right one.

Better yet, choose a system that allows managers to see the “big picture”, like when, why, and how often forklift operators are choosing or re-choosing the wrong battery. By running an operator re-choose report, as available from the EBatt system, managers can quickly figure out and correct poor operator decisions.

“If nearly everyone is choosing the wrong battery, it’s clear that they need additional training,” says Orf. “If a single person is repeatedly choosing the wrong battery, they too may need additional training.

Or they may simply need to be reminded to take the right one, as opposed to the closest one.”

To get the most out of a battery management system, there should be user-defined reports exportable to spreadsheets and other programs. Also necessary is the ability to sort data within reports without having to export it. This flexibility is required to manipulate the data as needed and provide a manager with information that is unique to their particular operation.

From a corporate-wide perspective, broad scalability is required to allow one battery management system to work with the entire scope of assets and facilities within that organization. Having enough user-defined vehicles, chargers, batteries, and battery types available can allow for comparison and benchmarking of battery performance between facilities.

Ideally, data should reside on a company’s own PCs as opposed to offsite data locations. This allows easy month-to-month or year-to-year comparisons without subscriptions and storage or downloading limitations that may make accessing historic information difficult.

The Pay-off for a Battery Management System “One Fortune 500 distribution warehouse that ran three batteries per forklift cut their battery use in half based on analysis of their operations, runtimes, and other factors,” says April Jones, Vice President of MTC’s EBatt Systems Division. “They were able to reduce their inventory by 60 batteries for $250,000 in savings.”

The immediate and ongoing payoff of using a battery management system is spurring more company managers to optimize their motive equipment operations with the improved tactical and strategic capabilities that such systems provide.

For more info about battery management systems, contact EBatt Systems at P.O. Box 1358, Temple, Texas 76503; 1 (254) 298-2900; toll free at (866) 953-2288; or visit http://www.ebattsystems.com.

By Del Williams Del Williams is a technical writer based in Torrance, California.