Advanced Energy & Battery Manufacturing
MES for battery cell, module, and pack manufacturing
Cell-to-pack genealogy that survives a field recall, formation-line OEE, electrode-coating and OCV/ACIR SPC with Cp/Cpk, and safety-critical torque-plus-angle fastening — all captured at the point of work, on machine signals you already have.
Battery and energy-storage work is a named use-case inside Qontiv's automotive practice rather than a separate regulatory lane. The forcing function on a traction-battery supplier isIATF 16949, arriving through its vehicle-OEM customers — so the APQP, PPAP, PFMEA, control-plan, and SPC modules on theautomotive pageare the same modules that run a cell or pack line. What follows is the process depth specific to this chain.
When one cell lot is suspect, you need to know every pack it reached.
A battery field action is a genealogy problem before it is anything else. A defective electrode batch or a single drifting formation channel can touch tens of thousands of cells, and each cell rolls up through a module into a pack that ships in a specific vehicle or energy-storage rack. Qontiv records each of those hops as it happens — electrode lot into cell, cell into module, module into pack — so scoping a field action means walking links that already exist, instead of a forensic reconstruction across coating, formation, and assembly spreadsheets.
Battery plants run continuous coating and formation upstream and discrete module/pack assembly downstream. Most MES products are built for one or the other. Qontiv models both: lot-tracked electrode and electrolyte feeding serial-tracked cells, cells nested into modules, modules torqued into packs — each hop recorded as a parent-child link, with the SPC, OEE, and fastening evidence attached to the same records the traceability walk follows.
Built for the battery production chain
Cell → module → pack genealogy & field-recall traceability
Every consumption step in the chain is recorded as a parent-child link: electrode coating lot into cell, cell into module, module into pack. Each link carries lot, serial, and sub-lot identity on both sides, plus the quantity and the timestamp — and, because both fields are mandatory rather than optional, the work order and the specific machine that made the link. A cell cannot be recorded into a module without naming the station that did it. That is what "captured at the point of work" means here, and it is the part a spreadsheet reconstruction can never recover after the fact.
To be precise about the shape: this is the traceability substrate, queryable and filterable by lot, serial, sub-lot, item, work order, equipment, and time window at each level. Walking a chain from a pack down to its cells means querying one level and then the next, against links that already exist — Qontiv does not assemble a rendered genealogy tree for you today, and we are not going to describe one that is not there.
- • Lot, serial, and sub-lot identity on both sides of every link, with quantity, timestamp, and mandatory work-order and machine attribution
- • Filterable at each level across coating, formation, and module/pack assembly — the substrate a field action is scoped from
Cell-formation OEE
Formation and aging are the bottleneck and the cost center of a cell line — channels are expensive, cycles are long, and idle capacity is invisible without instrumentation. Qontiv calculates Availability, Performance, and Quality per formation channel and per line directly from machine signals, surfaces the Six Big Losses, and breaks down channel utilization shift by shift. Supervisors see live formation OEE on the floor; managers see the trend without anyone keying a log.
- • Per-channel and per-line Availability / Performance / Quality from real signals
- • Six Big Losses breakdown with reason codes captured at the event
Electrode-coating, bond-gap, OCV & ACIR SPC with Cp/Cpk
Statistical process control on the parameters that decide cell quality: electrode coating weight and thickness, wire-bond gap on module interconnects, open-circuit voltage (OCV), and AC internal resistance (ACIR). Control charts with Western Electric rule detection and Cp/Cpk capability indices catch process drift before it becomes scrapped cells — and every measurement is tied to the serial it came from, so an out-of-control point can be traced straight to that serial's genealogy links rather than to a batch average.
- • Cp/Cpk capability on coating weight/thickness, bond gap, OCV, and ACIR
- • Western Electric rule detection with measurement bound to cell serial
Safety-critical fastening — torque + angle traceability
Module-to-pack and busbar fastening is a safety-critical joint: a loose or over-torqued fastener on a high-voltage interconnect is a thermal-runaway risk. Qontiv captures the torque-and-angle result for every safety-critical fastening operation, ties it to the pack serial and the tool that performed it, and ships electronic work instructions that won't let an operator advance past a NOK rundown. The pack genealogy carries the fastening evidence alongside the cell and module records.
- • Per-fastener torque + angle bound to pack serial and tool identity
- • EWI gating — a NOK rundown blocks the step; rework is recorded, not silent
Native machine connectivity — OPC-UA, MQTT / Sparkplug B, Open Protocol
Battery lines mix coaters, calenders, formation cyclers, laser welders, and DC nutrunners from many vendors. Qontiv's edge gateway speaks OPC-UA and MQTT with Sparkplug B natively and reads safety-critical tightening results over Atlas Copco Open Protocol. If your plant already publishes MQTT in a Unified Namespace layout, Qontiv consumes those topics and discovers the site, area, line, and cell hierarchy from them rather than making you map tags one at a time. First machine online in under two hours — no middleware project.
- • OPC-UA and MQTT / Sparkplug B — native, not via a connector add-on
- • Atlas Copco Open Protocol for torque/angle tightening results
- • Unified Namespace topics consumed and auto-discovered — Qontiv reads your namespace, it does not broker it
Which plan carries this
- Core — production tracking and work orders, the lot and serial genealogy links described above, electronic signatures, the tamper-evident audit trail, basic electronic work instructions, and OEE from manual input or a basic edge feed.
- Professional — full SPC (X-bar/R, I-MR, p, c, capability indices, Nelson rules), the edge gateway with OPC-UA and MQTT, OEE loss intelligence, and the advanced analytics and alerting engine. The coating, OCV, and ACIR control charts and the formation-OEE loss breakdown above assume this tier.
- IATF 16949 compliance package — the APQP, PPAP, PFMEA and control-plan, layered-process-audit, MSA, and customer-specific-requirement modules your OEM customers will ask for. Available today, and available on every plan as a priced annual add-on including Core — not bundled into a tier and not Enterprise-gated.
There is no free trial and no self-signup. Evaluation runs as a paid four-week pilot on one of your lines, at a published fee that credits in full against a first annual contract — the ladder and the pilot terms are atqontiv.com/pricing.
What this is — and what it isn't
Qontiv is designed for compatibility with the records, traceability, and controls thatISO 9001 assessors look for — and with IATF 16949 where your OEM requires it for EV-drivetrain and traction-battery programs. Qontiv itself isnot certified to any of these standards; the certification belongs to your organization. Your certification body audits your management system; Qontiv supplies the evidence.
When the recall comes, will you have the genealogy?
Cell-to-pack traceability, formation OEE, and OCV/ACIR SPC — captured at the point of work.