Building the data foundation for a battery R&D team

The problem

A previous consultant had built an input application and dashboard for battery test results, but neither was in active use and the company lacked the in-house skills to take them further. Two of the company’s largest data sources (production runs from the factory floor and measurements from the materials lab) had no analytics layer at all. Scientists were exporting data files by hand, and leadership had very limited visibility into operations.

The approach

Rather than replacing the existing tools, I stabilised and completed the partially built system, focusing first on making it usable for the lab team. I pushed the deployment of the custom web application and dashboard over the finish line, and then worked directly with lab personnel and scientists to align data entry forms and dashboard views with their actual workflows. I ran training sessions and added documentation to ensure clarity and adoption.

Once regular usage was established, I built an additional dashboard covering factory and lab data. To support both dashboards and ad hoc analysis, I consolidated the company’s fragmented datasets into unified source-of-truth tables. These tables served as a reliable foundation for additional modeling and reporting.

The outcome

• Scientists’ time spent running standard analyses reduced from hours to minutes
• A unified data layer enabled cross-functional analysis - for example, linking material properties to cell performance - without manual data stitching
• Data linkage between material properties and battery outcomes enabled analysis that drove a 2x improvement in cycle life, a primary KPI
• Around 25% of the company became regular dashboard users (weekly or daily), including scientists tracking experiments and engineers monitoring production