Tire Data Help Carriers Delay Need for Retreads

This story appears in the May 5 print edition of Transport Topics.

Large fleets with massive stocks of tires to maintain need a lot of tools. But the most important tool — data — is often missing, fleet managers and tire makers said.

The data could include the life span of treads and casings, the temperature at which tire inflation can be compromised and the change in durability of tires as a result of expanded rail use.

“Knowing why tires were removed, plus the age of tire casings and the number of retreads these casings are yielding, can indicate if your tires were properly maintained,” said Jose Martinez, business solutions manager for Goodyear Commercial Tire Systems. “For example, if the tires have picked up debris, yard cleanups or tire inspections might be in order.”

Fleets said this kind of information once was based largely on experience. But now, fleet managers have new tools that can provide precise information — which often causes them to

alter maintenance strategies.

YRC Worldwide, based in Overland Park, Kansas, and which ranks No. 5 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers, makes data collection and analysis a crucial component of its tire-maintenance program, said Joe Sturtz, vice president of equipment maintenance at the trucking company’s YRC Holland division in Holland, Michigan.

He emphasized the need for fleets to obtain the kind of data from tire manufacturers that could help with retreading decisions.

“A retread program starts with the right partner,” Sturtz said. “You want to do your homework there. The vast majority of your rolling stock in inventory is recap tires. There’s a lot of potential for waste. You don’t want to lose casings prematurely. You don’t want to experience any quality issues.

“This is where a lot of potential for data-crunching takes place — and your retread partner must be able to produce what [is needed] in terms of data, and we need to be able to interpret it.”

Randy Cornell, vice president of safety and recruiting at Con-way Truckload — a unit of Con-way Inc., which ranks No. 3 on the for-hire TT100 list — said testing and data are leading the carrier in the direction of tire-maintenance technology that would not have been feasible until recent years.

Such data would include likely temperature changes during a trip, which would affect tire pressure and require the technology to monitor and increase or decrease inflation levels.

“It used to be, you had a tire inflation system, and when you’d hook it up, it would inflate the tire to 100% [of the desired tire pressure],” Cornell said. “That’s all fine and dandy, but the problem is, if it’s 70 degrees and you inflate to 100 psi, as the [temperature] rises to 90 or 95 degrees, now suddenly, your tire pressure becomes 115 or 120, and that’s a detriment to the tire as well.”

“Some of the challenges these large fleets face is their [numerous] locations, the geography they cover [and] the sheer number of wheel positions,” said Jason Roanhouse, marketing program manager at Bridgestone Commercial Solutions. “What we try to do [at] Bridgestone . . . is aggregate as much data as we can and provide fleets information [to help them] make some useful and impactful decisions.”

Lacking data can mean unnecessary expenses — such as recapping tires that don’t need it, buying new ones prematurely or spending on the wrong technology.

To help with these decisions, Bridgestone recently upgraded its BASys Fleet Inventory system, which the company uses to capture data on tires submitted for retread — including tread depth and casing integrity.

The system is designed to help retreading customers make decisions about operations, maintenance, oversight and the choice of a tire program, Bridgestone said, adding that the data show fleets how well their retreading programs are performing.

“A lot of customers are asking if they’re maximizing retreading, or if they’re taking advantage of the reliability and cost-savings from the retread program,” Roanhouse said. “A lot of the software [that is proprietary for Bridgestone] gives the customer and our sales teams in the field help with developing those key performance indicators.”

Tire maker Michelin North America launched a similar initiative at American Trucking Associations’ recent Technology & Maintenance Council meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. Known as Michelin Truck Care, the initiative creates a nationwide network of service providers who share data and offer standardized pricing and practices that use TMC’s Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards numbering system.

“We’ve required our dealers to utilize the ATA’s recommended practices when they make a repair or perform a maintenance item, so we haven’t reinvented the wheel from that standpoint,” said Bruce Stockton, program manager of Michelin Truck Care.

The data-heavy integrated system was designed in part by TMW Systems. Stockton said one of the program’s goals is to bring consistency and access to solid data in situations when a truck is far from its home base. It’s something Stockton got to know well when he was a fleet manager for then-truckload carrier CFI, which was bought by Con-way Inc. and rebranded Con-way Truckload.

Armed with better data — such as the likely life spans of certain treads and casings — fleets are beginning to alter some of their maintenance strategies, Roanhouse said.

“We’re finding that tires are now reliable beyond what we thought the tire casing was going to be reliable for,” he said. Tires that once lasted five years now “could be reliable for six or seven years, which saves the customer money,” he said.

In some cases, the data also can help identify preventive strategies.

“You could start to identify a subset of data that shows perhaps you’ve got cuts or punctures, and you could identify environmental conditions that cause that,” Roanhouse said. “Maybe it’s a particular lane of travel for a customer they’re servicing, and there’s something environmentally that’s damaging the product. You could effect a change and reduce the damage and the cost.”

Double Coin Tires offers a system called Smart Money Fleet Tracking, which collects data by tracking tires from installation to scrap.

Walt Weller, Double Coin’s vice president of sales, said the system does not attempt to track every tire but uses a sample that provides enough data about tire-performance trends to show fleet managers where they should consider adjusting their practices.

“When you’ve got 4,000 or 5,000 tractors and 10,000 to 15,000 trailers out on the road, you’re not going to track every one of those tires,” Weller said. “You can take a sample size of maybe a couple hundred trailers and tractors . . . and pick up some tendencies. For instance, maybe most of your road failures occur on trailer axles after the first retread, so you might try not retreading the second time and selling that casing instead.”

To help solve its tire-maintenance problem, Con-way has been participating in a program with Aperia Technologies to test Aperia’s Halo truck-tire inflator, which monitors psi and can either inflate or deflate the tire while a truck is in motion. Aperia CEO Josh Carter said his company launched Halo at TMC in March, but it has been fine-tuning the product for several years.

“We like to use the analogy of a self-winding watch,” Carter said. “It uses the rotational motion of the wheel . . . to generate its own pumping power to add air to the tires.”

“A lot of [fleets] have never seen the type of data that we dug into about tire pressure and tire pressure management,” Carter said. “And even with a good maintenance program and good technicians, and even if you have a slightly motivated driver, manual tire pressure management is extremely difficult to do well.”

Aperia’s research helped to show Con-way why a good psi measurement doesn’t necessarily mean tires will perform optimally. When Cornell had data that proved air pressure is influenced by temperature changes, the business case for the tire-pressure maintenance system became clearer.

“We sought to understand the problems of tire inflation in its entirety, and one of the most important things we’ve learned is being able to have very clear evidence and data on what problems affect tire management,” Carter said.

Cornell said Halo, which costs $299 per wheel, appeals to him because it doesn’t require drivers to take action.

“With [only] a tire-pressure monitoring system, it’ll tell you what the tire pressure is — but if the pressure isn’t right, the driver has to do something,” Cornell said. “My preference has always been more of a passive system, because if [the system] requires somebody to do something, it’s not going to work 100% of the time.”

Yokohama Tire Corp. did not respond to requests for comment.