How IT teams automatically alert employees and IT admins when a device battery needs to be replaced using Rippling IT

What you'll learn

• How Rippling monitors device health information, including macOS battery condition

• How to use Workflow Studio to notify employees and IT when battery health changes

• How to build proactive hardware lifecycle workflows using real-time device data

What you'll need

• Rippling IT with Device Management

• Devices enrolled with Rippling MDM and able to connect to Rippling

• Access to Workflow Studio

The problem

As laptop batteries age, employees experience shorter battery life, random shutdowns, and degraded performance. Without centralized visibility, IT teams often discover failing batteries only after employees report issues.

Manual checks, ad hoc reports, or relying on users to notice symptoms slow down response times and increase support costs. Remote and hybrid teams make it even harder to know when a device needs hardware attention.

Without automatic monitoring tied to device data, failing batteries become a hidden problem across the fleet, impacting productivity and creating avoidable disruptions.

The hypothesis

If Rippling IT can track battery health continuously and use workflow automation to alert the right people as soon as battery condition changes, IT teams can replace failing hardware before it causes issues.

By using device data available in Rippling Device Management, organizations can build workflows that:

• Detect when a device reports a deteriorated battery condition

• Notify the employee using the device

• Alert IT teams so they can plan repairs or replacements

This turns hardware maintenance into a proactive, automated process instead of a reactive support burden.

The solution

1. Use Rippling Device Management to monitor battery health

Rippling Device Management provides visibility into many device attributes, including:

• Battery health for macOS devices

• Agent status

• MDM enrollment status

• Pending actions

• OS information

• Device condition if stored in the warehouse through Inventory Management

Battery health appears in the Device object as “Battery health (macOS)” and can include states such as Normal or Replace Now. Because managed devices must be enrolled with MDM and able to connect to Rippling, battery data stays up to date whenever a device checks in.

2. Create workflow conditions based on battery health

Workflow Studio allows you to build logic using any data field from the Employee Graph, including device attributes.

You can create a workflow that:

• Runs when a device record is updated

• Checks the “Battery health (macOS)” field

• Triggers when the battery condition changes or meets a specific threshold

For example, you can filter for devices reporting a battery health of Replace Now. This lets Rippling identify issues automatically instead of relying on manual monitoring or employee reports.

3. Automatically notify the employee and IT

Once the workflow identifies a device with degraded battery health, you can add steps to notify:

• The employee assigned to the device

• Their manager

• An IT admin or hardware operations group

Workflows can deliver notifications by email, Slack, SMS, or through a Rippling task. Because Rippling stores manager relationships and device assignments, messages route to the correct people without additional setup.

The impact

✓ Employees are notified automatically when their device battery needs attention

✓ IT teams receive alerts so they can schedule repairs or replace hardware

✓ Device failures are reduced because issues are addressed proactively

✓ Hardware lifecycle planning becomes predictable and automated

✓ IT saves time by eliminating manual monitoring of device health

By tying real-time battery data to workflow automation, Rippling IT helps IT teams act before device failures impact productivity.

FAQs