If the cell manufacturer can deliver cells with a proven quality history of OCV within +/-0.02V then you will be able to assemble and charge these cells without gross balancing. However, you will need to consider a few things: 1. cell manufacture, formation, ageing end of line testing all. This is what you are probably trying to avoid as it can take hours or even days for the pack balancing to remove large SoC differences. An SoC. This is the approach used by the satellite industry and adopted by motorsport. The cells undergo a number of checks from visual inspection, capacity and internal resistance measurement before finally selecting the best cells. This is an expensive approach. Similar to option 3, but using just OCV to group cells such that the initial SoC of the cells in a pack will not require gross balancing. This does mean that you need to measure the. Prior to assembling the battery packs you can charge/discharge all of the cells to a defined voltage. This ensures all of the cells are matched in SoC prior to assembly.