Other Voices: The impact of right-sizing on battery room operation

Editor’s Note: The following column by Harold Vanasse, vice president of sales and marketing, Philadelphia Scientific, is part of Modern’s Other Voices column. The series features ideas, opinions and insights from end-users, analysts, systems integrators and OEMs. Click here to learn about submitting a column for consideration.

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In the second article in this four-part series, I discussed the impact of proper battery rotation on battery room operation and maintenance. Battery room management systems are the single most effective tool to ensure proper battery rotation and reduce waste in the battery room.

The best systems directly measure the charger to obtain accurate data on the state of charge of each battery. With this information, operator judgment in battery selection is eliminated because the system has determined which battery has had the longest cooling time since charging. The result: operators use fully-charged, fully-cooled-down batteries that increase battery life and improve warehouse productivity.

Right-sizing
Proper rotation of batteries can, on an ongoing basis, save significant money in the battery room through small but continuous adjustments to operating and maintenance procedures. Right-sizing a battery room also offers significant cost savings by properly matching the size of the battery inventory to the operational needs of the forklift fleet. When there are too few batteries, battery assets are being over-utilized, reducing battery run time and battery life. When there are too many batteries, unused assets are being wasted.

Determining the proper size battery fleet can be a challenge because of the difficulty in obtaining objective, accurate information. Operators themselves, while using the batteries and accessing the battery room every day, may provide subjective feedback that can be misleading and unreliable. Industry “standard” ratios may provide some helpful guidance, but these ratios assume that all facilities operate the same way, and they do not account for changes in warehouse and battery room operations over time.

Right-sizing via the Internet
The Lean method for right-sizing a battery fleet requires the kind of ongoing operations feedback and measurement provided by a battery room management system. Key areas to measure include battery availability at any given time, including when there are more batteries than needed; when the battery room is running out of available batteries; the length of cool down time; and battery cycles per week.

Some management systems automatically report state of charge data to the cloud, where easy-to-understand reports can be generated and made conveniently available using any web browser. With some systems, users can subscribe to a web-based service, which enables managers to optimize assets by analyzing battery performance and creating reports remotely on the Internet. These reports can verify that a battery fleet is right-sized for the facility.

In addition to right-sizing a fleet, utilizing battery room management systems typically results in faster and less frequent battery changes, longer battery run times, increased battery life and increased productivity. Using a battery room management system, the potential savings for large warehouse operations can be $100,000 or more per year.

In the fourth and last article in this series, I will discuss how to become more efficient in performing a battery room maintenance job some have described as “a simple task done poorly:” battery watering.