Sandip Pradhan
Chief-IT
Exide Industries

In the fast-changing digitized world, customer needs information in various formats coming to them rapidly in a real time environment. It has been observed that the customers of the automobile battery are mainly concerned to assess the preventive maintenance needs of their automobile battery. IoT (Internet of Things) enabled Automobile Battery (IAB) as a product is capable of handling some of the key issues of the automobile battery segment that multiple stakeholders related to the product encounter.

Challenges by the stakeholders in battery industry:
a. Head of service struggles to ensure timely service delivery to the customers, categorize customers’ complaints, monitor and control the service personnel working on the ground, arrangement of management of logistics for the disposal of scrap batteries, reduce process delay for warranty claims, management of scrap batteries, and reduction in service cost.

b. Head of sales of the manufacturing firm would like to have the visibility and control of data related to health of the batteries on the ground so that the customer needs can be addressed before they reach out to the dealers or call centre to register complaints.

c. Head of SCM would like to identify causes of high time and cost of transportation of battery from customer location to service centre for warranty claims. They need to forecast the demand on a monthly basis based on different factors.

d.  R&D Engineers currently don’t have access to enough data for analysis for value addition to customer relationship management.

Proposed Solution:
The proposed IAB solution comprises the following components - IoT enabled device, GPS device, IoT Platform on the Cloud, Apps for Customers, Technicians and R&D Engineers etc., Analytics / Dashboards. This is a device mounted in the lead acid automobile battery either on the inside (integrated with battery) or on the outside (retrofit) performing various sensing functions of the battery and battery parameters and communicating wirelessly the information through GSM (Global System for Mobile) network to cloud platform.

 
A retrofit or in-built IoT unit can be fitted within the battery during assembly of the batteries in the manufacturing line. As soon as the battery gets charged, IoT device will be alive to start capturing the data from the charged battery. The IoT device would be able to transmit the vital parameters like voltage, charging current, discharging current, temperature, electrolyte level, and electrolyte specific gravity. GPS device would be a part of the IoT unit and will provide the Geo parameters like locations of the installed battery, region, district, state etc.

Captured data will be transmitted through a communication network to a cloud platform to establish a Connected Battery Cloud Platform (CBCP). This platform becomes capable of communicating various modules of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM). CBCP establishes access to install base information, service contracts, inventory and financial posting etc from the back-office applications. The captured data on the Cloud platform is then analysed for Remote Diagnostics, Predictive Analytics, Condition-based maintenance, Asset and Inventory tracking and Warranty tracking.

IAB includes a few Apps/web portal for Customers, Field Technicians, R&D Engineers, Head of Sales, Service and SCM.