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Longer lasting Belts, New Split Spools -- no regrind:Layout 1 8/26/2009 4: 37 AM Page 1
the EZ Select system uploads daily.
The vendor uses that information
to identify potential problems with
batteries or chargers. Based on trend
data, the company can recommend
an action plan to drive out costs,
Roeser says.
Chamberlain notes that this type
of analysis allowed the system,
which required an initial investment
of less than $24,000, to essentially
pay for itself in just one month.
To accommodate additional busi-
ness, DSC had been planning to add
another lift truck to its fleet. “With
the information from the battery
management system, we realized
that we already had a healthy ratio
of batteries to trucks, and that we
could add a truck without buying
any additional batteries, chargers,
or stands,” he recalls. According
to EnerSys, DSC achieved savings
of $25,000 in the first year after
installation and is projecting annual
savings in future years of about
$31,000.
That was enough to convince
Chamberlain and his colleagues to
spread the word about the bene-
fits of automated battery selection.
“We have this system now in 11 of
our logistics centers,” he says. “Our
goal is to continue rolling them out
because they have had such a posi-
tive impact on our business.”
The system’s impact extends well
beyond time and cost reduction,
in Chamberlain’s view. “Our cus-
tomers are always challenging us to
improve what we do for them and
how our business is run,” he says.
Automated battery management
has helped DSC meet that expec-
tation. “What it has done is take
something that for us was subjective
and inconsistent, and turned it into
something controlled and standard-
ized,” he says. “There really isn’t a
downside.”
Before EnerSys and DSC turned on all
the system’s capabilities, they ran it “blind”
for a week, recording activity but without
providing any instructions to operators.
The purpose was to get an accurate base-
line of operators’ current behaviors. The
results, in Chamberlain’s description, were
“startling.” It turned out that operators
were choosing the right battery only 3 per-
cent of the time. The system documented
that they were choosing whichever battery
was closest, most convenient, or newest.
The blind test, moreover, showed why
run times and lifespans were so short: The
average cool-down time for the batteries
the operators selected was just two hours,
Chamberlain says.
LESS COST, MORE EFFICIENCY
The automated battery management sys-
tem, together with operator training, has
helped DSC Logistics all but eliminate
battery-selection errors. When the system
was first installed in 2012, the accuracy of
battery selection soared to over 96 percent
from 3 percent, and the average cool-down
time for each battery rose to 10 hours from
two. As a result, Chamberlain says, “We
are getting proper run times now … We’ve
pretty much gone from two to around one
change per shift.”
Those changes have also improved aver-
age battery lifespans. “We conservatively
estimate that we put an additional six
months on a battery’s life with this system,”
but it can be considerably more, depend-
ing on the circumstances, says Roeser of
EnerSys.
Automated selection has also reduced
the time spent changing batteries at the
University Park DC by 430 hours annually.
There are two reasons for that, Roeser says:
Operators no longer walk around looking
at batteries before deciding which one to
take, and the number of battery changes
per shift has been greatly reduced.
Because all of the batteries are properly
charged and cooled, more of them are
available for use at any one time. That has
allowed the three-shift operation to cut
down on the number of batteries it maintains per truck from 2. 5 to just over two.
An EnerSys analyst monitors the data
