Wide Diversity of Work Applications, Sizes Challenges Fleets to Select Optimal Match

This story appears in the Sept. 14 print edition of Transport Topics.

For trucking fleets that operate different vehicles for an array of uses, an important challenge is to equip each one with the correct tires.

Many manufacturers make a variety of tires — and dealers sell an even wider array — but experts said the challenge in meeting the tire needs of mixed-fleet vehicles often is largely a matter of knowledge and strategy, rather than technology or capacity.

“Here’s the issue,” said Guy Walenga, director of engineering, commercial products and technologies at Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire LLC. “The commercial tires are not ‘one size fits all,’ and not even one type of tire fits all.”

Walenga said with so many applications for different wheel positions and tire designs, the result is a challenge for fleets that have to sort through selections of highway, pickup-and-delivery, wide-base and other tires — each with their own variations.

A tire choice can make a vehicle more fuel-efficient and can reduce the cost of operation. It also can add to the durability of a truck that will do a lot of starting and stopping.

Though many tires can do several of the above, few can do it all. So, the fleet purchasing chief often is choosing a business priority that goes beyond whether a tire fits a vehicle or how long it will last.

The buyer also needs to look at the portion of the country in which the fleet operates and consider whether it stays mainly in one area or travels to different regions.

Don Baldwin, product marketing manager for Michelin North America’s commercial truck tire division, said manufacturers must find ways to make their products more multifunctional as fleets diversify their vehicle use, while also helping fleets to reduce the tire inventory.

“It’s true of most fleets today,” Baldwin said. “You walk into a terminal, [and] you’ll see everything from material-handling equipment, forklifts to front-end loaders and trucks, and if it’s a cement operation, earthmovers and so on. . . . Our sales guys have the capability to go in there and know the right product.”

Don Pabst is vice president of equipment services for YRC Worldwide, which runs various classes under several brands. He said the right tire program is a big-dollar issue.

“We spend about $45 million a year on tires,” Pabst said. “So you’d better have a good program.

“A supplier, to be in the door, has to be able to offer nationwide service,” Pabst said. “They have to be able to offer new product and recapped product and used product. There’s not three or four best ways. There’s one way or one best practice. That’s why to be a supplier on this fleet, it has to be someone who handles tires from cradle to grave . . . they can do it all.”

For YRC, which uses five different tire sizes and eight different tread designs, a good program places a premium on making strategic decisions about when to retread, when to replace casings or when to replace the tires themselves.

“We wear drive tires on a single-axle application out very fast because there’s a lot of torque on the scrub,” Pabst said. “Naturally, you run the rubber off them pretty quick, so in six or seven months, you’ve driven through four drive tires.”

Penske Truck Leasing supplies a large client base of mixed-vehicle fleets; the largest fleet is its Penske Logistics unit. Mark Swift, vice president of field maintenance for Penske Truck Leasing’s north-central region, said his people need to ask a lot of questions before they can begin to design a tire program.

“It comes down to looking at their operation, their application, what kind of weight rating they have,” Swift said. “Are they inner-city? Are they over-the-road? Is it a longhaul application versus distribution? Is there a lot of curbing?”

Answering those questions, Swift said, enables Penske to advise fleets on potentially competing priorities, such as cost per mile versus rolling resistance, or the life of a tire versus fuel-efficiency.

“You don’t want to increase your fuel economy a certain percentage, only to have the tire cost wash away any improvements you’ve made in the running cost per fuel and having the running cost be so much greater that it zeroes you out,” Swift said. “Generally, the tread compound will wear at a quicker rate, so you can generally have a higher operating cost on more fuel-efficient tires. There’s no cost-benefit on that.”

Mike Parks, vice president of maintenance for Kelley Fleet Services, Mission Viejo, Calif., said the complicated nature of choosing tires means a single supplier rarely can provide the best cost option all the time.

“If you have one supplier that tries to fit all the needs you might have, you’re probably going to be cost-effective on some of the tires but not on all of them,” Parks said.

While some tire manufacturers supply fleets directly, most use dealers as middlemen, and representatives of both fleets and manufacturers said dealers are often the key to implementing an effective program for a mixed-vehicle fleet.

“That’s the guy who’s going to deliver product,” Bridgestone’s Walenga said. “That’s the guy you’re going to go to first. That dealer should know that business inside and out, and he should be able to help you find the best tire for the application. Maybe one brand isn’t going to cover all the needs of the fleet.”

Parks said Kelley Fleet Services prefers to deal directly with manufacturers, keeping national account relationships with several of them.

“If we’re setting up a contract for a certain area, we don’t want to go to 35 different cities and negotiate with the dealers on a one-on-one basis,” Parks said. “It’s easier for us to go to a national account status and have that tire manufacturer disseminate that down to the dealers.”

Snider Tire Inc., Greensboro, N.C., is the primary supplier of tires to Estes Express Lines. Russ Hunt, Snider’s senior vice president, said the company regularly visits 40 Estes locations across the country, providing the type of “cradle-to-grave” program Pabst described as essential for the supplier of a major mixed-vehicle fleet.

Hunt said Estes, based in Richmond, Va., runs a variety of tandem-axle and single-axle trucks, most of them tandem-axle trucks.

“There are different tire sizes and different wheel types that we have to provide to them, and we have an online ordering system that basically shows what they can order,” Hunt said.

The online ordering system, he said, helps Snider meet very specialized needs without requiring Estes to keep a large inventory.

Because the tire needs of a mixed-vehicle fleet can be so complex, Snider also relies on automated ordering to make sure it brings back what it should from a delivery.

“To minimize inventory of new tires and wheels, we have a route that goes there every week,” Hunt said. “During the week, they will order some online, and we acknowledge and fill the order. If there are two steers, there should be two tires that came off a retread, so it’s a system where, whatever we deliver, you should have an equal number of tires coming back.”

Walenga said fleets need to scrutinize dealers closely before trusting them to implement a tire program.

“The fleet has to give the supplier the fleet’s goals and expectations,” Walenga said. “The fleet needs to say, ‘I want my drive tires pulled off at 8/32nds [tread depth]. I want my tires retreaded. I only allow nail-hole repairs — no section repairs.’

“The fleet could have a whole host of conditions for how it wants to do business, and it’s up to the dealer to know those,” he said.

Fleets that want to simplify their tire strategies always can standardize their tires, even for mixed-vehicle applications, but that is a complicated proposition unless you design your fleet with such a strategy in mind at the outset.

Several sources for this story mentioned UPS as a prime example of a mixed-vehicle fleet with challenging tire needs. But according to a UPS spokeswoman, the company has worked to achieve a high level of standardization — putting the same tires on different kinds of vehicles — that simplifies the process.

“We do have lots of standardization in our fleet that makes it less complicated than it might seem,” said UPS’ Kristen Petrella. “A lot of our vehicles take the same tire, and we have a lot of the exact same delivery truck, which all take the same tires, and our tractor-trailer vehicles all take the same tires.”

Rick Phillips, manager of commercial sales for Yokohama Tire Corp.,  said tire manufacturers need specialty divisions to supply fleets that use a broad mix of vehicles.

“They’re all very different,” Phillips said. “From light-truck tires to light commercial tires, which are more heavy-duty, you then get into small-medium trucks and then you get into heavy trucks. Our company is set up in divisions. We have a consumer division that deals in passenger cars to light-truck tires, and then we have our commercial division — which is split into the truck divisions — which starts with commercial light-truck tires, and then heavy-duty trucks and then over-the-road.”

Fleets also can track their tire inventory for different needs with  electronic bar codes. Companies, including Tire-Track LLC, allow fleets to install a permanent, machine readable bar code on tires, allowing for easier tracking and tire management. In most cases, the information is “cut” into the rubber, so it doesn’t rub off, Tire-Track said.

Baldwin noted that manufacturers can’t expect fleets to be constantly changing their tires because their vehicles are versatile and might shift from one function to another.

“As we look at product, we can’t say, well, on this product, this is just linehaul, and then when you want to make deliveries with it, you’ve got to change the tires,” he said.

“That’s not going to be good for the fleet. So we’ve got to make sure our products are even more capable. On drive tires, we’ve got to make sure it can handle the fuel-efficiency needs, the energy needs and the traction needs — but also the high torque coming out on these engines.”

Without specific expertise on the advantages of a particular kind of tire, Parks said, users often can make mistakes in determining the likely advantages of a particular choice.

“On a tractor-type application, for example, traditionally people like to have a very heavy-lug type tire, which is just a very deep tread design,” Parks said. “It almost looks like a snow tire that you can put on a car, and the belief is that you’ll get better traction and better mileage. There is some truth to the traction part, but the wear is escalated, and in terms of money, I think that’s the biggest mistake people sometimes make.”