Our warehouse system thinks in products and quantities. A pallet of e bike batteries arrives, we record that we hold two hundred of product code so and so, and when an order calls for twelve we pick any twelve, and which twelve has never mattered.
That is about to change for one of our clients. Under the European Union's battery regulation, from February 2027 batteries for electric bikes and scooters, industrial batteries above two kilowatt hours and electric vehicle batteries placed on the EU market need a digital battery passport. Each battery carries a unique identifier and a code linking to a record of what it is made of, where it came from and how to handle it at the end of its life. The client we store for sells into Europe from our depots. Their compliance team asked us in the spring whether we could tell them which serial numbers went to which customer. We could not.
The passport is our client's responsibility. But a record that follows each battery needs somebody to say where each battery went, and in our part of the chain that somebody is a picker with a scanner. Recording every serial means scanning every unit at goods in and again at picking, which slows both. Our system can hold serial numbers, but it has never been switched on, and our reports, our stock counts and our client billing all assume quantities. A return from a customer has always meant an item put back on the shelf. With a passport it means a particular battery coming back, with its history.
A separate EU regulation on sustainable products is due to extend digital passports to other product groups over the next few years, so I do not think batteries will be the last. A third party warehouse that can only count is going to find some clients cannot use it.
We are preparing now. Serial capture has been switched on for that one client, at one depot, so we can measure what it does to picking rates before it is mandatory. Our contracts are being rewritten so that traceability work is priced rather than given away. And our next warehouse system tender asks for serial level tracking as a requirement, not an option.
For thirty years our job was to know how many. More and more, it will be to know which.
– Serguey Shinder
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