Six months in. One month until it counts.

Six months ago I joined Philadelphia Scientific as VP of Commercial Operations. 

I did not come here from the battery industry. I came from years in warehouses and cold chain DCs and working across a wide variety of supply chain flows. I have walked a lot of floors. I have shivered in a lot of freezers. I thought I understood how a distribution center works.

I now realize that I understood so much except the central, sometimes hidden room that the whole building depends on.

Here are a few things that my first six months with Philadelphia Scientific has taught me:

1. Every part of the building has a dashboard except this one:

Throughput, pick rates, dock times, labor hours, dwell time. Operations leaders can tell you all of it to two decimal places. Ask the same person what percentage of their battery fleet cycled last week and the room goes quiet. Not because they do not care. Because nobody ever built them a way to see it. 
The battery room is the last dark room in an otherwise measured building.

2. There is no such thing as "the battery problem." There are several, in the same building.

This one embarrassed me. I assumed a fleet was a fleet. Then our own people walked me through the warehouse of a global retailer and national grocer’s Distribution center. The pallet jacks run hard on first shift picking for the stores, then sit essentially idle on second. The reach trucks barely move on first shift, then work themselves into the ground on second when the inbound trailers arrive and everything has to go up into the racks. Same building. Same roof. Two completely different power problems, two completely different answers.
If you are being sold one answer for a building that has two or three shifts and four applications in it, that is worth a pause.

3. Cold changes the math, and cold storage operators feel it first.

A battery does not deliver the same work cold that it delivers warm. Conservatively, our own published research puts a battery at 30 degrees Fahrenheit at roughly 75 percent of the energy it would deliver at 70 degrees. And a battery sitting at a low state of charge in a freezer environment is vulnerable to freezing outright, which is not a performance problem, it is a destroyed asset.
Nobody tells the pick rate that it is cold. Volume is volume. So the operation quietly absorbs the difference in extra changes, extra labor hours, and extra batteries bought to cover a gap nobody measured.

Which brings me to why I am writing this in September.

If you run a retail, grocery, Bio/Pharma, e-commerce, or 3PL operation, your battery room is about to be tested harder than it has been all year. This peak season will not create new problems. Rather, it will expose those that were already there but with little capacity and no time to fix them.

The uncomfortable part is that the fixes are not fast. Batteries have lead times. Chargers have lead times. Electrical work has lead times, and every contractor in your region is booked by October. The decisions that determine how your battery room performs during peak are the ones you make in the next few weeks, not the ones you make in week two of peak when a truck is sitting.

So here is what I would do in the next 30 days, and none of it requires buying anything:

Ask what percentage of your fleet cycled last week. If nobody can answer, you do not have a capacity question yet. You have a visibility question.

Put a number on change-out labor. Changes per shift, times minutes per change, times your loaded labor rate, times shifts, times days. Most operations I have sat in have never done this arithmetic. It is usually larger than anyone expects, and it is the number your CFO will respond to.

Walk the room in the coldest part of your building or at the end of the hardest shift. Not on a Tuesday morning. That is when the room tells you the truth.

Six months is not long enough to be an expert in batteries – I know that and you know that. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is long enough to see the pattern, and the pattern is this: the battery room is the cheapest place in the building to find efficiency, operational savings, and financial opportunity – but it is the last place anyone looks.

If you are heading into peak busy season with a battery room you cannot see into, I would rather you find that out now, than in November.

The team at Philadelphia Scientific is having this conversation with operations leaders every week right now. If you want to be one of them, reach out to our sales team via sales@phlsci.com. Twenty minutes now beats a crisis call during the middle of peak busy season.

Kip Wetzel

VP, Commercial Operations