Hal Vanasse, vice president of sales and marketing for
Philadelphia Scientific, a provider of battery management
systems. “People are happy to throw money at battery
rooms, but they do not look systemically at what’s going on
and how to reduce waste,” he says.
Almost any process related to changing and charging
batteries can be wasteful and inefficient, Vanasse points
out. For example, if you’re checking the water levels of batteries that don’t need water, then you’ve wasted time,
money, motion, and people. If operators are queuing for
battery changes because of poor charging practices or slow
watering, then you’re wasting time and people. And having
more batteries than are needed for the required work produces costly excess inventory. All this waste can add up to
tens of thousands of dollars annually, even for a small fleet,
he says.
Not surprisingly, Vanasse touts electronic battery management systems as a tool for ensuring that only necessary
tasks are done, and in the most efficient way. But he’s hoping that the concept of lean itself will catch on with every
company that uses industrial batteries, whether they adopt
battery management systems or not. “The interesting thing
about the lean framework is that it has a feedback mechanism that requires you to measure what you are doing
against a plan, then make decisions that will lead to
improvement,” he explains. “It’s systematizing not what we
do, but what we should do.”
4. Fleet managers will look to get more productivity out of existing assets. There is tremendous pressure on fleet and battery room managers to
improve their return on assets, says John Kim, general manager of Aerovironment’s Power Systems Business Unit,
which supplies battery charging systems and accessories.
“Management wants more out of that same piece of
machinery and the people who use it,” he observes.
Vendors are responding to that pressure by developing
new technologies specifically aimed at achieving more with
less. Kim’s company, for instance, currently has a product
under development that will allow users of fast chargers to
charge two trucks from a single port. Port Splitter, as the
device is called, does “sequence charging,” constantly check-
ing the state of charge for two batteries and automatically
charging one or the other as needed.
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