GTS's latest device tells good batteries from bad
JR Rodrigues, vice president of marketing at Global Technology Systems.
Large retail chains have been able to get better use out of their barcode scanners and other devices because of batteries made by Global Technology Systems (GTS), headquartered in Framingham. The company, founded in 1999, manufacturers batteries the retail, logistics, and public safety industries use in tablets, barcode scanners, portable printers and other electronic devices.
Vice President of Marketing JR Rodrigues spoke about overseas manufacturing, battery innovations, and a new patent-pending technology that he said could be make it much easier to tell good and bad batteries apart.
When was the company founded?
We have been in business since 2000, and we are the largest after-market mobile battery manufacturer in the country. We manufacture mobile batteries for ruggedized devices, including barcode scanners, portable printers, ruggedized laptops and tablets. None of which would be interest to you and me. The three main markets that we currently target are retail, logistics and public safety.
Over the course of the past 17 years, we’ve run up a marquee list of clients, including Target, Staples, Lowe's, CVS, Home Depot, Walgreens, and Kroger, and people in the logistics world like UPS, FedEx, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and large metro police fire and emergency crews out there, like the city of Los Angeles, and the county of Las Vegas, including police, sheriff, and fire. We have amassed a marquee list of clients in retail, logistics and public safety.
We did this by producing higher quality batteries than equipment manufacturers, and generally selling them at a lower price. They’re high capacity, at a lower cost, with a better design. In the world of mobile devices, equipment manufacturers focus on the device that costs thousands of dollars, and batteries are an afterthought. For us, all we make are batteries, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We’re also unique in that we actually have our own R&D, design and engineering teams, based in West Palm Beach. We design, engineer and we have close manufacturing partners in Taiwan and China.
Where are your offices located?
Framingham is the headquarters, where we have administrative and sales offices. West Palm Beach is engineering, design, quality control and warehouse facilities. But we are unique in the regard that, we have R&D, engineering and manufacturing facilities in Taiwan and China.
We make batteries and chargers. In addition to making after market batteries for major manufacturers of mobile equipment, we also make custom batteries and chargers for big clients and also for other equipment manufacturers who OEM our parts. We have a real big OEM capability as well as direct to end user and markets.
Give me an example of how your device might be used.
Primarily, public safety buys two-way radios. Oftentimes policemen will say, "My radio is more important than my gun." In those cases public safety is a two-way radio. In the barcode scanner business -- now you're talking retail -- where they're scanning a product at a distribution center, a truck comes in, offloads stuff, and scans pieces -- the logistics are pretty heavy. If you think of UPS, they have barcode scanners in the truck and warehouses, they don't do anything but scan scan scan all day long.
Also portable printers, if you've ever rented a car, they’ll come around as you're turning the car in. In that regard, the equipment -- barcode, scanner, two-way radio -- are all made by different manufactures. Now they have one source for all the batteries. Beyond that, mobile device equipment manufacturers tend to render their devices obsolete three or four years down the line. They want a new version, once they stop making an old version, so you better throw the device out.
We keep some of our clients using their devices and getting value much longer than the equipment manufacturers would prefer. One of our retail clients, they have some devices that are 20 years old. The only way they can do that is because we make batteries for them while other companies have stepped out of the market for those devices.
The OEM, they are going to stop making batteries the minute they become obsolete. All of the other small after-market battery suppliers, they buy what they can find on the spot market and resell it. If there's enough business, if the client is large enough, we’ll make more.
Where do you manufacture?
Taiwan and China. We manufacture with a partner organization that is exclusive to us. We also have sales offices and warehouse facilities in Europe. Probably the only places we don't sell to are Asia and Africa. North and South America and Europe are all very active territories for us.
How many employees do you have?
Just under 50, between 45 and 50, and that’s about evenly split between West Palm Beach and Framingham.
How do you stay innovative in this constantly changing field?
You know how big mobility is getting. Our catchphrase is, "Your organization runs on mobility, and mobility runs on batteries." We’re leading the charge in innovation. We have a revolutionary new technology. It’s patent pending, and it’s truly disruptive -- although I know that term is overused.
The idea is based around the fact that batteries go bad. They build up impedance by sitting on a shelf over time because they are nothing more than a little black box that contains chemicals, and those chemicals wear out.
In your kitchen drawer, I’ll bet you have a junk drawer that has old batteries. Some may be good, some may be bad, but they're identical. It's the same thing in the ruggedized device world. You can’t look at a battery and tell if it's good or bad. Bad batteries do not take a good charge. Now if a battery fails, you have to walk across the plant and grab a new battery. Up until about a year ago, the only option you had was to buy a device costing tens of thousands of dollars that will allow you to put a battery in it, and six hours later it would tell you if it’s good or bad. Some public safety agencies, in desperation, hire a battery technician to do that all day long.
We have released a patent pending device the size of a deck of cards. In three seconds it will tell you if the battery is good or bad. We can go into a site in a couple of hours test hundreds of devices, get rid of the bad ones and replace them with new ones. When we tell that to a retail, logistics or public safety mobility person, first their eyes widen, them their jaw drops and they say, "How quickly can you come in?" This is truly disruptive. We might be the same thing in the mobile power space that Uber is to the taxi industry.
Sounds like a good idea.
Lots of money gets wasted around this problem. A person who was in the middle of scanning might have to go across the plant to get more batteries, and then figure they might as well hit the bathroom on the way back, then go to the charger and pick another battery that says its fully charged. But it might not be.
If the batteries are in, but the device is still not working, they go back and tell their boss, "We need to repair this because the device is bad." So they send the device out for repair, which may even cost $7,000, and it comes back, and the repair depot says, "No trouble found" because they put on a new battery. You have tremendous service costs, and in desperation, some organizations just buy more good batteries. They can't tell which are good which are bad, so they probably continue to buy more batteries than they need. Because of that, repair costs go through the roof.
How much does the device cost?
We provide the device for free, but they have to agree to do three things. First, if we send a free test they have to agree to test it. Then they have to agree to buy replacement batteries from us. Lastly, they have to recycle their bad batteries in special containers that we provide to them and pick up at their location, free of charge. There are no upfront costs, they just have to buy replacement batteries from us. Our batteries are higher quality, with a higher capacity, at a lower cost than what they have.
The device pairs with a mobile app we have, which you can download to a phone or tablet, that’s how it actually works. It’s called GTS Test & Replace. It’s available on Google Play and through iTunes as well.
It pairs the tester with engineering services. The tester talks to the mobile app, and it goes up into servers where we have intellectual property in our algorithm that does this amazing operation. We can give you an answer in three seconds. We applied for a patent, but it only covers the testing device and mobile app. If we wanted to patent our algorithm, we would have to make it public, which we have not. The secret sauce is the special algorithm our engineers created based on decades of experience.
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