Philippe Alleil (Forsee Power Solution) about batteries, mobility and medical equipment

Philippe Alleil is the industrial director of Forsee Power Solution, a France-based international battery integrator. He explains why some of the most innovative technology today depends on energy storage capacity. From his engineer perspective, batteries appear to be far more complex than they seem. 

The battery is a two-century-old technology. What are its innovation perspectives today?

Philippe Alleil: Two hundred centuries ago batteries were heavy, bulky and quite simple technology-wise. They were not powering many devices. Today’s battery are high tech items. They are a combination of electrochemistry and electronics. They are small, light, and powerful. They are embedded in any type of devices, from the smallest, like mobile phones, to the biggest, like trucks or buses. The technology has improved for the last two century and its keeps improving today. In the future, batteries might replace power plants for instance, by storing huge quantity of energy and work like actual power providers. The potential for innovation is still huge but it takes a lot of time to develop.

An efficient technology is usually standardized. How do professional users manage to benefit an ever-changing piece of technology like a battery?

Philippe Alleil: As far as we are concerned, the speed of technical improvement is not a problem for us. Neither for our customers. Forsee Power Solutions is not a cell manufacturer. We are a system integrator, meaning that we monitor all the technologies available on the market, we know all the cells’ spec sheets and take care of selecting the right one for our clients. To put it simply, they trust us to pick the right electrochemistry for  them. Then we use our engineering skills to fit the cell in their product. We take care of matching and adapting the right technology with the right customers. Every time someone has a need for a mobile power supply and does not find the solution on his own, he calls an integrator. And that’s how the devices we all use every day are usually fitted with the best cell technology available on the market.

What are the responsibilities of a battery integrator like Forsee regarding the performance of an energy storage solution?

Philippe Alleil: The integrator’s responsibility is tremendous. His job is to fit a battery system within a bigger system like a car, a bicycle, or a wheelchair for instance. Even though the integrator does not produce the cell he uses, he picks it on the behalf of his customer and plug it into his product. He can therefore be regarded as an intermediary. But from the customer’s perspective, the integrators is responsible for the reliability of the whole battery system. If the power solution ever fails in any way, the customers will come to the integrator. The job therefore requires a very good knowledge of the technology along with an excellent quality of service.

Forsee’s customers come from various sectors like medical equipment, mobility systems, and robotics. How do you manage to meet their specific requirements equally?

Philippe Alleil: It always starts with a good discussion between our development teams and our customers. Our first goal is to understand the environment of our customer’s product, and write down an index comprising all the product specifications. All the companies we know serve share a need for complex power solutions and want the technical part to be taken care of for them by a specialist. These companies look for advice as much as for the right battery system. We offer both and make sure they are 100 percent satisfied. It is very demanding, but very rewarding too. We no longer sell standard, mass-produced battery systems for instance. But people now come at us because they know our expertise in the field of high performance, high duration and safety battery systems.

Why is the medical industry such a big consumer for battery integration solutions?

Philippe Alleil: Actually, the medical industry does not consume more batteries than other sectors. However, it does have a need for very reliable, high quality batteries and power solutions. Medical devices manufacturers want guarantees regarding embedded battery systems. Integrators bring such guarantees. Hence, of course, Forsee Power Solutions frequently works with the medical equipment industry, and makes its expertise available for it.

Electric cars and mobility in general are still small however. Is mobility an important market for Forsee yet?

Philippe Alleil: Mobility is a key market for the future. We regard it as a development perspective since it is a technically challenging market. But it also carries a little bit of disappointment since it was expected to take off very quickly and to stand for up to 20 percent of the world automotive market. It is not yet the case. A couple a niche markets are taking off though. Electric trucks, electric buses, light wheels vehicles for instance are slowly becoming common in urban areas. They are used for delivery in city centers, for public transportation. They make life in cities more sustainable. Forsee works a lot with mid-sized companies which do not have their own development team for battery solutions. We can see that such companies grow in number and that they will keep doing so.

Robotics’ development depends mostly on energy storage solutions’ improvement capacity. What is the state of the art regarding in that field?

Philippe Alleil: Robotic industry today has not entered the mass-production stage. It is a niche market as well, producing prototypes and very innovative products. It is a technological showcase for many companies, including battery integrators like Forsee Power Solutions. When we work on this market, we select the most advanced cell technology, the most complex battery management systems in order to come up with the best of engineering. Everybody learns a lot from such projects. Robotics engineers learn, and we learn with them too since we have to figure out new solutions to solve problems that never occurred before. We have to be innovative to come around the limits of existing technology.

Maintaining reliability at the highest level as possible must require important R&D expense. What is Forsee’s policy regarding this matter?

Philippe Alleil: Of course R&D is important in order to ensure the high level of satisfaction reliability-wise. Besides we rely a lot on our engineers who take special care of reliability requirements. But reliability is a concern at every stage of the production no matter the client. We need to pay attention to it during the early stages of conception, during the manufacturing process, and afterwards with quality control process. Our quality policy applies to the every stages of value chain.

Most of your competitors are bigger than you. Why do your clients prefer a small service provider like you over larger ones?

Philippe Alleil: Many actors on the market were born twenty years ago, sometimes thirty years ago. Back then, producing a battery pack was a different industry. The job was requiring different skills. It was all about putting component together and delivering a pack. You hardly needed any top-notch engineering skill to do that. Nowadays, technology is very diverse, it has become more technical and intricate. You need those engineering skills to produce some very specific battery pack for very specific applications.

Forsee Power Solutions was once involved in producing very simple battery solutions. But we figured out there was a serious competition on the market already. This is why we choose to develop an offer based-on custom-made solutions and high added-value systems. In many cases, customers who look for such solutions come from very promising markets. We talked about robotics, and electric cars. Standard solutions for their needs do not exist yet. But these markets are up-and-coming, they keep growing and so do Forsee. All in all, being smaller than the biggest players is not really a problem for us.