The Looming IoT Battery Tsunami Part II

Let’s recap Part I, which basically makes the case that there will be millions if not billions of batteries that are used in Internet of Things (IoT) products that will need replaced. For any given business, this may be in the hundreds or thousands of batteries that will cease to provide power to critical IoT solutions. I’m sure the recent record-breaking heatwaves are pushing many batteries in devices “in the field” to their breaking point due to thermal soaking. Phoenix just passed 144 consecutive days of over 100-degree temperatures.

In Part II, we will focus on what your vendor and your maintenance teams can do to help minimize the impacts of battery failures and move toward predictive and proactive handling of the problem.

Let’s start with step one - your vendor selection process and your IoT project’s Request for Proposal (RFP). If your project team has your use cases, product quality expectations and minimally viable product requirements addressed, adding a few key questions concerning battery lifecycle management can help your team select a product with lower overall support costs and reduce “surprise” outages.

1.?????Does the vendor’s IoT product have complete battery diagnostic (health) as part of their device's boot-up, scheduled and event driven diagnostic services?

2.?????Do battery diagnostic data and battery alerts get fed into the vendor’s Software-as-a-Service platform? Are these shown prominently on critical pages and to the right persons? Perhaps they offer email or other notifications?

3.?????Does the vendor’s SaaS platform have Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to feed into your asset maintenance systems? If not, does the vendor supply a maintenance-lite application or page where you can see all assets with IoT products that have issues?

4.?????When looking at the IoT device in the field, can your maintenance team visibly see there are battery issues (e.g., LED lights)? If not, can they easily scan a QR code without deinstalling the device and link a phone application to the device and have it report the status of battery and other critical functions? This capability can be very useful when your teams are conducting scheduled maintenance, periodic inspections and asset inventory verifications.

5.?????Does your vendor have predictive IoT device health that utilizes machine learning so that when assets are having scheduled maintenance your team can pull up the IoT devices that are attached and know which ones need attention? Does the vendor’s system help you schedule impromptu maintenance when there are field failures (i.e., at the next route stop, terminal, or over-the-road service center)?

Keeping in mind that mobile IoT devices, versus IoT devices in fixed locations, are much harder to maintain, especially if they are used over wide geographic areas such as trailers, containers, chassis, construction equipment, maritime or rail assets.

In Part III we’ll discuss what the IoT industry or individual IoT providers can do to provide Battery Management as a Service.

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