Lithium battery equipment represent one of the main items in CAPEX list for establishing a lithium battery manufacturing plant.
Lithium battery equipments don’t affect just the CAPEX but affect heavily even the OPEX. Indeed, features like:
- Throughput (parts per minute produced)
- Footprint
- Automation level
- Average OEE in production environment
have a huge impact in dry room dimension, number of machines required to achive target annual production capacity, manpower, reject produced so disposal cost.
First of all, there is NOT a general rule to choose the lithium battery equipment supplier. But it’s important to be aware about all KPIs which can affect the project quality and schedule. The lithium battery manufacturer strategy consider all of these KPIs with different weight triggering the decision for a precise target of equipment suppliers.
We can start listing the main KPI and then analyze them one by one:
Price
For many companies, lithium battery equipment price seems to be the main driver. First of all we need to stat to analyze where the selling price comes. The selling price is the sum of:
- Sales cost
- Project management cost
- Design cost (customization cost)
- Parts and component purchasing/manufacturing cost
- Labour cost for parts assemblying and equipment testing
- Shipment cost
- Equipment installation and testing in costumer site cost
- Supplier company no-direct cost of departments like financial, accounting, purchasing, HR and all other functions which don’t work activtely on the project
The labour cost of battery equipment supplier represent one of the most important item since labour activities are in all project phases from Sales to commissioning and istallation through design and project management. The final lithium battery equipment price depends even on the technology used and machine design: overdesign trigger a huge amount of components and parts to purchase, install and test which affect the labour amount and then the final cost of equipment itself.
Prototypes and machine series have different selling price due to R&D activities needed to complete the project. Many Asian lithium battery equipment companies success come from the high volume of sales which allows to produce machine in series minimizing the weight % of R&D cost, the overall labour effort and even allows to standardize parts and commercial components triggering a lower cost of equipment.
Machine throughput (parts/minute)
This is one of the most important KPI, for some stakeholders maybe the most important as lithium battery equipment purchasing driver. The machine throughput affect the number of equipment needed to achieve the annual production capacity and the manufacturing plant dimension which means. The number of equipment needed have a direct impact on manpower needed (FTE) and even the overall equipment and lithium battery production line footprint which define the production floor dimension. In lithium battery manufacturing business, the biggest OPEX contributes are:
- Material
- Energy consumption
- Labour
In the overall energy consumption for lithium ion battery manfuacturing the biggest contributes come from some manufacturing process like electrode/slurry drying and dry room operation. The dry room energy consumtpion vary with the volume of the dry room itself. Less equipment, smaller footprint so smaller dry room and lower OPEX in term of energy comsumption.
Equipment automation level
Each equipment foreseen downtime scheduled due to its automation level and design which require stops for maintenance, material replacement and other manual operation. High is the machine throughput and more important become the equipment downtime schedule. Each stop can be translate in missing production which has a direct impact on the annual production capacity of the overall lithium battery manufacturing plant. The equipment automation level allows to improve machine uptime, reduce the buffer size but even reduce the FTE needed for each manufacturing process. This will have a direct impact on the OPEX as well
Battery equipment supplier project portfolio – experience
Manufacture automation equipment for lithium ion battery business required even a good knowledge of the process involved and the overall manfuacturing process for lithium ion battery cells and pack. In this business, the responsability about product quality and process is not always define and many lithium battery manufacturer trust on equipment supplier in delivering stand alone machines and complete production line which reach the OEE and production quantity target.
Demonstrate a successful experience in the business, allows the lithium battery equipment supplier to receive the trust from the battery maker companies, especially the new camers which needs technical support during the start up of their first manufacturing plants. Equipment supplier design and commissioning teams must be aware about the challenges to control electrode and separator materials in the winder machine or even which are the main issue in ultrasonic or laser welding in cell assembly line. The quality criteria must be known and the common inspection procedures must be implemented through the entire project phases to ensure a good product quality compliant with battery manufacturing standards.
Currently there are new camers even in the equipment supplier business which don’t have a direct experience in the business but long experience in other industries which use similar or identical process technology (cutting, welding, filling, splicing, unwinding etc). Their technology can be many times better than existing suppliers, so they represent a challenge from lithium battery maker point of view.
Product portfolio
In the lithium battery equipment business, there are players specialized in one single process as mixing or coating, or winding or notching, and others which are able to provide entire production area or full lithium battery manfuacturing line from mixing to formation. It’s part of lithium battery maker strategy decide what is the best choice in term of equipment suppliers: full turnkey provider garantee just one supplier which is the easiest solution in term of project management but sometimes is not the best from technology point of view. Who is able to provide equipment for all manfuacturing process couldn’t be the best or the most innovative in all of them. Each lithium battery cell maker need to find its balance which is part of its strategy to start production in the shortest time.
Time to production
Currently, one of the most challenge item in the lithium battery project is the time to production. The delivery time of dry room and manufacturing equipment represent the most critical item to make the lithium battery maker ready for start of production. But, as the previous KPI, there is not a general rule here. Many times the delivery time of battery manufacturing equipment is affect by product specification and general technical specification availabiltiy which relie to lithium battery manufacturer.
Often new camers in lithium battery manufacturing business have very tight schedule and they anticipate the equipment purchasing and building construction in order to meet the deadline and allows to receive funds from investing partners. But the product design maturity level sometimes doesn’t meet the other project activities schedule, creating some trouble especially for equipment design and manufacturing and building construction. The building and dry room cosntruction comes from number and size of equipment and the facilities are defined by each single equipment utilities consumption.
So the building specification and requirements cannot be defined in advance before choose the equipment suppliers. In the meanwhile, equipment suppliers have some difficulties to provide right delivery and price estimation without detailed product specifciation which in some case arrives after the purchase order. All of these affect the project successful in term of qualtiy and delivery time.