New GTS Test & Replace™ Service eliminates negative financial impact of bad batteries for retailers

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: New GTS Test & Replace™ Service eliminates negative financial impact of bad batteries for retailers.

The new Test & Replace™ Service from Global Technology Systems, Inc. (GTS) gives retailers a proactive way to manage their battery assets across the enterprise. Test & Replace is an efficient process that identifies, removes, and replaces the bad rechargeable batteries that cost them so much money in lost productivity every day.

Mobile devices are critical to the success of your business. Your personnel rely on these devices to perform crucial tasks such as managing inventory, completing customer transactions, printing shipping labels and more. Hand-held mobile devices are central to your minute-by-minute operations—you can't afford to let unhealthy batteries prevent you from achieving your goals.

What are Unhealthy Batteries?

As batteries age, their performance degrades due to the natural breakdown in their internal chemical processes. Even when a battery looks to be fully recharged, it may not be capable of performing a full shift's worth of work. This is what we mean by "unhealthy."

Unhealthy batteries are negatively impacting your business every day whether you realise it or not.

How Healthy are Your Batteries?

How do you know which of your batteries are healthy and which aren't? You can't tell by looking. The simple answer is you have no way of knowing. Unhealthy batteries are everywhere in your enterprise and they're wreaking havoc with your mobile operations.

Unhealthy batteries are a leading cause of:

1. Work Stoppages

Battery failures bring your operations to a sudden halt and prevent employees from completing their critical tasks. When a battery doesn't last a full shift, the worker must stop what they are doing immediately and find a new battery.

2. Increased Device Maintenance Costs

Too often, mobile devices sent out for service are returned simply because of undetected bad batteries.  Those are called "NTF," for No Trouble Found. That's so frustrating, and it results in a double-edged cost, because the organisation must not only absorb the cost of an unnecessary device service call, but they must also do without the use of that mobile device while it's out for what proves to be an unnecessary repair.

3. Unplanned Capital Expenditures

Most organisations lack an effective process for managing their battery assets because they have no easy or efficient way to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy batteries. This lack of insight into the health of their battery fleet leads to surprise disruptions in their mobile operations and often requires a major expenditure for a large number of new batteries to correct the situation.

Interrupted Communications
Mobile devices are often used for critical communications. When vital communications are interrupted because of unhealthy batteries, it impacts multiple people across the entire enterprise. This costs time and money, negatively affects the customer experience, and poses potential safety risks.

4. Avoiding the Negative Impacts of Bad Batteries

So how can companies avoid these negative business impacts? It starts with recognising the importance of healthy batteries within the mobile enterprise and investing in a process to manage batteries across the organisation.

Up until now, there were only two choices that an enterprise had to combat the problem of undetected bad batteries:

Replace all the batteries at once—known as a total battery 'refresh.'
Continue to buy new batteries piecemeal.

As you can see, neither way is ideal; they're both inaccurate and inefficient:

• A total refresh is costly and throws out perfectly good batteries along with the bad.

• Buying new batteries piecemeal does nothing to identify and remove bad batteries from use, so the problem is on-going.

You need something better.

The GTS Solution—our New Test & Replace Service

An enterprise needs to be proactive and institute a strategic program to manage their mobile power. That's the only way to get out in front of the problem.

That means doing three things:

Identifying bad batteries
Removing them from service
Replacing only the bad batteries, so they optimise their capital expenditure.

GTS' exclusive new Battery Test & Replace service does exactly that.

It's an on-site service that identifies, removes, and replaces unhealthy batteries from your operation, reducing work stoppages and increasing productivity.

Here's how it works:

• GTS arranges for third-party technicians from RGIS to visit each location and test every battery

• Batteries are tested to criteria provided in advance by the customer

• Independent RGIS technicians test every battery, regardless of brand, using specially-designed testers

• Bad batteries are identified and immediately replaced with healthy new GTS batteries that won't die in the middle of the shift

• Batteries identified as healthy are returned to service: no healthy batteries are inadvertently thrown away

• There is no disruption to the enterprise's operations and no mobile devices need to be sent off premises

• The whole process is done in less than 90 minutes per location

Prepare for the Peak Holiday Shopping Season

This is a particularly valuable action to take now—before the all-important peak season is upon us. For most retailers, the peak shopping season represents between 20-40% of their annual sales! Unhealthy batteries are troublesome any time of the year, but they're absolutely disastrous during the peak holiday season when your operations are running at full tilt!

Your mobile operations simply must be in top shape for the holidays and Test & Replace can help ensure that you achieve your goals.

Case Study—Proven Cost Savings

GTS recently conducted the Test & Replace service for a Top 5 U.S. national retailer with about 1,500 locations and around 90 batteries per store. In less than one month, GTS and their service partner RGIS visited each location and tested every battery. The retailer noticed immediate costs savings and increased productivity as a result of the Test & Replace service.

After the program was completed, the results were dramatic:

-      Reduced NTFs due to bad batteries by 94%, saving over $1.6 million
-      Reduced device service calls by 64%, saving over $1.1 million
-      Reduced mid-shift work stoppages by over 50%, saving over $6.5 million

That is over $9 million (£6 million) in annual savings.

GTS and ADD Batteries (a Preferred UK Partner of GTS) Introduce Test & Replace to the UK

Test & Replace was recently introduced into the UK by GTS and ADD Batteries. Now, major UK customers will benefit from the reduced operating costs and increased efficiency that results from having their mobile operations brought up to date by Battery Test & Replace.

ADD Batteries is uniquely qualified to present and implement the exclusive Test & Replace program, working either through specialised resellers or directly with end users, depending on the scope and requirements of the particular circumstance.

Working in close concert with GTS, ADD's technical expertise and support capabilities stand ready to ensure that an enterprise's critical mobile device operations are never hampered by undetected unhealthy batteries.

Together, ADD Batteries and Global Technology Systems' combination of reliable, state-of-the-art mobile power technologies and forward-thinking, cost-savings services like Test & Replace ensures that U.K businesses—large and small alike—will benefit from smooth-running, efficient mobile operations that maximise their profitability.

Contact ADD Batteries

To contact ADD Batteries, visit: http://www.addbatteries.com/

e-mail:  info@addbatteries.com or call (+44) 0118 9071491