When NOVONIX opened their battery prototyping facility, they had a small team overseeing a large, data-intensive battery testing operation. 

Battery testing goes far beyond simple pass/fail product testing that is common in other fields — it involves charge-discharge cycling across a range of different application scenarios, generating large amounts of data. Analyzing and drawing insights from this data, quickly and efficiently, is central to the work of developing battery technologies. As NOVONIX grew, they decided to develop an in-house solution to manage the sheer volumes of battery test data and associated materials and process metadata that were quickly becoming unmanageable. 

"We immediately started being proactive and building up our own systems," shares Stephen Glazier, Director of Cell Technology at NOVONIX, “but they were disjointed across many things from spreadsheets, to databases, to Python scripts, and other scripting languages.  Trying to centralize that and get everyone making plots that all look the same was fairly difficult.”

As the solution scaled, these disconnected systems created significant challenges including:

 

“We were spending anywhere from a quarter of our day to over half of the day just sitting in the data,” explained Stephen. “If you’re spending a lot of time doing analysis or visualizing, you’re not spending as much time interpreting the data and really understanding it, which is what’s key.”

 

NOVONIX found their in-house solution was taking away from the core focus of their business. 

“Are we going to dedicate the amount of time, investment, feedback loop, support, security that is needed to really scale a solution?" asked Lori Mcleod, President of Battery Technology Solutions at NOVONIX. “We needed to balance our priorities in terms of where we really needed to spend our time, energy, talent, and money.” 

NOVONIX was effectively "building a software company within our company," requiring new skills, tools, personnel, and significant resources that diverted focus from their core competencies. Building a solution while simultaneously using it was challenging, needing to maintain 100% uptime while adding functionality and building in security, all while maintaining a standard of excellence for their core business. 

 

NOVONIX made the strategic decision to move away from their in-house software solution and partner with Voltaiq, pairing Voltaiq’s best-in-class battery intelligence software platform with NOVONIX Ultra-High Precision Coulometry (UHPC) equipment, as well as NOVONIX’s expertise in battery R&D and materials development.

The decision to partner with Voltaiq enhances NOVONIX’s ability to provide customers with world-class expertise, software, materials, services, and hardware. Despite having capable engineers, the company's interests were better served by leveraging specialized battery software expertise through this partnership.

Partnering with Voltaiq provided immediate relief, enabling the team to focus exclusively on their core business. “It really just allows our R&D teams to do what they do best — spending their time doing R&D, interpreting the data, really getting the right insights, not having to wrangle data from different sources," shared Stephe