The Business Case For Better Batteries

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

September 2016 Innovative Retail Technologies

Lost productivity, inventory inaccuracy, and social irresponsibility are just a few of the sins associated with bad mobile device battery management.

Curt Quinter has been in the battery business for 41 years. Today, he’s president and chief engineer at Impact Power Technologies, LLC (IPT), but his history of contributions to the battery as we know it today is unparalleled. Quinter honed his skills at General Battery and Yuasa before managing exotic battery research for 12 years at Westinghouse and directing operations at Honeywell Battery. He was the developer and chief engineer of the first lithium polymer land mobile radio batteries. He worked at the Waxahachie super collider, researched nuclear power shoulder-to-shoulder with South Korean engineers, and founded Global Technology System. That’s just a snapshot of highlights from his career prior to his brief retirement. Ken Murphy, COO at IPT, lured him out of that retirement in October 2012 to lead the company.

The Impact Of Productivity On Profitability
Today, Quinter spends his time helping IPT customers benefit from new battery technologies. In retail, he says productivity improvements are chief among those benefits. “If a retail associate is doing their job and 6 hours into the shift their mobile device battery dies, they take a break. They lose productivity. The job doesn’t get done, and when the next shift comes in, a new associate has to pick up where they left off,” explains Quinter. That kind of disruption costs real dollars, money that IPT helps its customers track and recoup. In one customer’s 500-device installation, IPT identified the loss of 20 to 30 minutes per day, per device due to bad batteries. “At an average associate wage rate of $20 per hour, that 500 device battery issue was costing the company more than $1.4 million annually in lost productivity,” says Quinter. That’s to say nothing of lost throughput and potential sales lost to downtime.

Another IPT customer exemplifies just how blind many organizations are to the efficiency gained through properly functioning batteries. An operations director from a company operating 60 distribution centers had hired an auditor to analyze DC productivity. The audit exercise found that 40 of the 60 DCs were posting 35 percent higher productivity figures than the other 20. Further investigation uncovered that those 40 high-performing DCs were enjoying longer mobile device uptime thanks to superior batteries. “The average operations manager doesn’t realize that a $40 battery can have such massive implications on productivity and throughput,” says Quinter, “and those are gains that most hemorrhaging brick-and-mortar retailers need right now.” He says even those who acknowledge that they have a problem are somewhat defeatist about it because battery performance degradation has been a fact of life for so long. “It’s the same effect we see on a tradeshow floor,” kids Quinter. “By 2:30 in the afternoon, everyone with an iPhone is looking for a place to plug in.”

Building Better Batteries
IPT has dedicated its efforts toward perfecting its battery technology and battery management systems. By tweaking the chemistry in its replacement option for the Motorola MC65, for instance, the company says it has increased the power capacity of the battery 20 percent without changing any size specifications or requiring a new charger. As a result, one of its major bigbox retail customers was able to decrease its annual battery purchases from 15,000 to 4,500. Quinter says IPT is producing replacement batteries that last 40 hours — versus the original equipment’s 8 — and that can be recharged without issue a guaranteed 900 times. “When better batteries allow merchants to skip entire procurement cycles, significant topline savings are added to the benefit of efficiency and productivity gains,” he says.

Longer lasting, more powerful batteries are increasingly important as the applications running on mobile devices continue to proliferate. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi also draw more power, but Quinter says application proliferation and wireless communications are an afterthought to original equipment manufacturers, who rely on planned obsolescence and want to sell more batteries.

Asked why IPT is so confident it can grow its long-life battery sales in a market where opportunity is predicated on dead batteries, Quinter scoff s at the notion that IPT could sell itself right out of a market opportunity. “How good is the battery market?” he asks hypothetically. “Anywhere goods are moved, services are sold, products are sold or rented, there’s a mobile device that needs a battery. It’s always expanding, there’s always another application.”

While the case for better batteries might be clear, legacy device investments are holding many merchants back. Some continue to operate mobile devices that are 20 or more years old and no longer supported with batteries from the OEM. While that puts those merchants in a risky position as scalability and functionality go, they contribute to the success of companies like IPT. On the distribution and logistics side, Quinter says the struggle for giants like UPS, USPS, and FedEx is much the same. “For those carriers to take on a wholesale upgrade to new devices, they would face a billion dollar investment. But the original equipment manufacturers can’t keep up with their battery and device demands, and in the meantime their market share is being pecked away by nimble, tech-savvy regional carriers,” he says. Saving money on powering their legacy mobile device investments is therefore a necessity on more than one front.

Multiple Facets Of The Battery’s Importance
In addition to productivity and topline expense savings, poor battery performance can negatively impact inventory management as well. “Let’s say you have associates using mobile devices for physical inventory counts in stores. When their batteries fail, you suddenly have human beings conducting a physical count. The entire process becomes dependent on memory and prone to human error over the simple depletion of a battery.” That error leads to immediate inaccuracy around out of stocks and overstocks, which have big implications on customer service levels and inventory carrying costs.

Business benefits of better batteries aside, longer-lasting batteries put fewer dead ones in landfills. That makes battery performance a sustainable story for every stakeholder.