Efficiency-minded manufacturers change patterns of making tires

By John Russell
Knight Ridder/Tribune
Published August 12, 2001

Your great-grandfather was lucky if the tires on his roadster could make it to California and back without a couple of blowouts.

Over the decades, tires have gotten better, due to improved materials, engineering and construction methods. You can drive about 43,000 miles, nearly twice around the Earth at the equator, on an average set of tires before they wear out or go flat. That's up from just 28,000 miles in 1980.

And you're paying less. The average person shells out just $40 for a tire, down from $63 in 1980, adjusted for inflation. A pair of running shoes costs more.

Longer-lasting tires. Lower prices. That might be a good deal for you.

But for tire companies, it's a recipe for ruin, unless they can make tires better and cheaper at the same time.

And that's why the world's largest tiremakers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a tire factory of the future.

The plants are springing up around the world as as new construction or modified factories with the latest equipment and technology.

Many are highly automated. Others have robots replacing the workers who cut and splice rubber and wrap it around a drum. Some mix new and old technology. Some are so small and flexible they can be set up and produce their first tire in less than a day.

The companies have given the new systems strange names and acronyms: IMPACT, MIRS, ATACS, C3M.

All operate a little differently. Each company believes its system will give it an edge over its competitors, but it could be years before anyone knows which is the winner.

"I think the jury is still out," said Marvin Bozarth, executive director of the International Tire and Rubber Association in Louisville. "Until recently, all these companies have been very secretive about this technology. There's been so little information available."

But that is changing. Two years ago, Bridgestone/Firestone invited reporters to tour its new, $435 million automated factory in Aiken, S.C., that makes 21,000 tires a day with just 800 workers, or about one-third as many as would be needed in a traditional tire factory.

And recently, Goodyear has allowed reporters into a truck-tire factory in Luxembourg and a passenger-tire plant in Napanee, Ontario, that use components of its new technology that will be phased in over the next 15 years.

Tiremakers are racing to get a leg up in the intensely competitive $60 billion worldwide tire market.

"It's a huge challenge for tiremakers," said Harold Herzlich, a chemical engineer and independent tire consultant in Las Vegas. "They need to build good tires at less cost. So they are all trying to eliminate manpower. And they're also trying to put together the various components of a tire more precisely."

The makeovers represent one of the largest leaps in how tires are made in more than 50 years.

For years, tiremakers have improved how they mix rubber, make fabric cords and assemble more than 20 materials that go into a tire. But those changes have taken place in a conventional tire factory, a cavernous building containing different operations where a tire slowly comes together.

Now, for some tiremakers, it's not about mixing rubber in a new way. It's about cutting out dozens of steps and making durable, safe tires with a minimum of human contact in a fraction of the time.

"If you look at tire-making historically, the focus has never really been on manufacturing until the last five or 10 years," said Michael J. Sison, an analyst at McDonald Investments in Cleveland.

"It was all about price wars and building market share. Companies needed to get bigger to build economies of scale. That's why there was a lot of consolidation. But now that wave is over. The focus now has to be on efficiency and the return on capital at your plants."

Several steps combined

At Goodyear, that focus began about five years ago in the basement of the company's Akron Technical Center, a former tire plant.

Engineer Jim Benzing had an idea for reducing the number of steps needed to piece together the rubber components of a tire.

The traditional way was to make long strips of a dozen different types of rubber--the inner liner, sidewalls, barrier, ply-gum strips and others--and extrude and roll them separately, storing them on individual rolls.

Why not skip all those intermediate steps and form them together, Benzing wondered. "You can save a lot of steps and get a better result," he said.

The result: a hot former, a huge piece of equipment that Goodyear calls one of its biggest manufacturing breakthroughs in decades.

At a factory in Luxembourg, a hot former applies 12 of the 23 components of a truck tire in one continuous strip of rubber. That provides the highest level of precision and uniformity on a tire, the company said.

The hot former sends the rubber strips to tire building stations, where machines begin assembling the rubber with plies, belts, beads and other parts. The tire is then sent to an oven.

Goodyear calls its new manufacturing system IMPACT, short for integrated manufacture precision assembly cellular technology. The goal is to improve quality and reduce cycle time, while increasing productivity 135 percent and cutting labor costs about 35 percent.

Today, Goodyear has a hot former in two truck tire plants--Luxembourg and Danville, Va.--and plans to put them into others.

"We're targeting them to all of the large plants, probably six plants by 2007," said Bradley Bruggeman, Goodyear's director of facilities planning and corporate services.

Industry officials say more automation and fewer workers could produce a more precise tire.

"The more it's automated, the less chance you have of an out-of-line belt or an improper splice that could cause a tire to fail," Bozarth said. "It takes out the human error and the guy that's hungover on Monday morning."