Planning, tracking performance, air pressure checks, proper tire matching and rotation, proper repairs and rim maintenance are among the important strategies for coping with the current tire shortage.
—Rob Mills, Manager, Marketing Services, Bridgestone Firestone Off Road Tire Co.

By Penelope Grenoble O’Malley

“What’s really hit me hard,” says Lewis Bumpus, solid waste director with the Williamson County Solid Waste Department in Franklin, TN, “is my wheel loaders. I’ve been using the heaviest ply tire I could find, a Michelin 32-ply mining tire. But I can’t get them anymore. I’ve got a crisis brewing, and I don’t like crisis management.”

Bumpus uses his 950 loaders part time in his transfer station, on the construction and demolition face of the landfill he manages and in the dirt pile. “Working with dirt with solid tires causes problems with the drive shaft and the U-joint,” says Bumpus. “On the working face where we do our recycling, debris like shingle nails puncture the lightweight tires that come with the machine and, with construction and demolition waste, the sidewalls are especially vulnerable. My tire dealer says it’s a year before I can get a tire like that, and of course there’s no way I can wait a year.”

“I’ve been criticized for the size of our tire inventory,” says Darold Salyer, maintenance manager for Paradise Waste Service Inc. in Phoenix. AZ. “But it’s proved to be somewhat prudent. We don’t have delivery and supply problems. We have on hand what we need to manage the fleet, which is about $170,000 worth of inventory.”

Bumpus and Salyer put two different faces on the tire shortage that has been developing over the course of the last twelve months. Salyer, who runs a fleet of 160 class A vocational refuse trucks—45 frontloaders, 61 automated sideloaders, 26 rolloffs, and 15 rear loaders, plus container delivery vehicles, has developed a relationship with his local supplier to assure he has on hand what he needs. Bumpus, a victim of the booming market in mining commodities and the US government’s actions in Iraq, had explored all available resources for the off-the-road tires he runs on his loaders and had come up empty.

“It’s been painful the last 18 months,” says Curtis Decker, national manager, field engineering for the Continental Tire North America Commercial Group. “We’ve had to tell our regular customers that we don’t have what they want.”

Andrea Berryman, Goodyear’s global marketing manager for OTR tires, says their plants are “full-out globally,” with no open capacity. “Every single tire is allocated.” She doesn’t see any relief from this crisis until late 2007, possibly 2008. “There’s simply an unprecedented level of demand, with the mining and construction industries, the military, and OE all cycling high at the same time.” She warns that 2006 will be a tougher year for tires than this year has been, because the reserves that manufacturers relied on to get through 2004 are nearly gone.

Other suppliers are more circumspect. “There’s no shortage of tires,” says Don Darden, marketing communications manager for Bridgestone/Firestone North American Tire LLC. “We went through a similar situation back in the late 1990s. The big difference then was we were able to draw on offshore production to pull up the slack. Currently we’re seeing a huge global demand for tires that has outpaced production.”

Michelin Earthmover Worldwide describes the current tire squeeze as a “worldwide constrained capacity issue.” Shawn Rasey, director of sales for Bridgestone Firestone Off Road Tire Co. in Nashville, TN, characterizes the current situation tire manufacturers find themselves in as “uncharted territory.”

“It’s kind of the perfect storm,” says Rasey. “A number of factors converged simultaneously including the emergence of economies in developing countries like China and India and their push to construct infrastructure. In the past these markets have been cyclical, a bit up and a bit down, but now they’re all going full out. Add to this the pressures of military operations in the Middle East, and that coal, gold, and copper are all now at record highs across the board. Plus with construction spending and road building in this country, ancillary industries—like aggregate—are very strong. It’s just simply that demand has outstripped supply.”

Everyone agrees the bad news is that supply is not likely to catch up anytime soon—two to three years for commercial truck tires and more than double that for OTRs. The good news is that the shortage provides managers an opportunity to take a look at their tire management strategies, including tracking performance, maintenance, and employee training.

“In the past when there was an abundance of inventory,” says Cara Junkins, OTR field engineer manager for Continental Tire North America Inc., “you could call around and get prices. Now you’re just trying to find a tire, any tire.”

At Yokohama Tire Corp. in Fullerton, CA, director of commercial sales John Cooney counsels that for the time being at least just-in-time inventories are a thing of the past. Cooney advises fleet owners to look forward at least 30, perhaps 60 days for truck tires, anticipate their needs and make them clear with their dealer or service provider. “There are just no reserves,” says Cooney.

Like their customers, suppliers develop coping strategies of their own. “We’re having to carefully manage sales within our various channels,” says Darden. “For truck and bus tires we have the replacement market, where we sell to dealers who in turn sell to end users. We have original equipment manufacturers we have agreements with, then we have the truck-stop channel, because over-the-road trucking needs to be able to find tires out on the road. My recommendation for all customers right now is to keep good track of their needs, work closely with their suppliers, and keep orders in the pipeline.”

“Changing over to heavier tires requires a major retooling and literally costs a lot of production,” Decker explains. “So we kind of wait for the pain threshold to change and then we build as hard as we can until we satisfy as many orders as we can, then we change back to our other tires. If we can keep those changes small, it gives us a much better efficiency in building. Unfortunately when we’re talking about waste hauling, we’re talking about a specialized, heavy-duty, typically larger sized tire. They take a much larger ply, a much larger bead, and a much larger inner liner. And that means more extensive retooling.”

But Rasey says tooling up has not been the only challenge. “There’s been speculating in certain markets that has put some pressure on futures, and it’s really affected raw material prices. More than not having raw materials available, all the manufacturers have had to absorb horrendous cost overruns in the raw material acquisition process. We have ended up having to pay market prices, or the price index has changed enough that we’re forced to go up as well. The bigger problem is capacity, which means hardware, people, and equipment.

“In any tire manufacturing process you have basically two inputs. You have the raw materials, which are your oil-based products, carbon black, steel, the natural and synthetic rubbers. And then you have what we all refer to basically as conversions, which is turning out the finished goods, which requires people, factories, equipment, and everything else necessary to put a tire together and get it shipped out. The people generally are available, although there’s usually a 6- to 12-week minimum lead time to get folks trained. The real issues are the level of sophistication and the lead time on the equipment, which are all basically hard investment items and can require long lead times, especially in the off-the-road segment where everything is on a grand scale—big molds, big tire assembly machines. Michelin has announced a capacity expansion. At Bridgestone Firestone we’ve announced a capacity expansion. All these things are good and they’ll all help. But to get set up and start to produce volume is typically an 18- to 24-month process at a minimum.

“All this is good to know,” says Racey, “but the key issue is what our customers can do about it. There is a handful of items on the short list that are really important. First, align yourself with a first-class local servicing dealer, someone who specializes in the kinds of tires you need. Someone who has good equipment and well-trained personnel and 24-hour service. Someone you can partner with and establish your tire needs, say for the next 12 to 18 months.

“The goal is to fine-tune your tire management and tire maintenance program, which can run the whole gamut from matching tires to the job to air pressure programs, which are critical, to repair and retread programs. Retreads have an important part to play in this shortage situation.”

Cooney agrees, “What you’re doing when you partner with a good service provider is taking yourself out of the tire business. The key is communicating with whoever it is you chose. In this market it makes sense to be a multi-brand buyer. There was a time when people thought you could be a more effective business partner with someone if you gave them all your business. There’s some truth to this, but in this kind of a market if you’re doing business with only one service provider or one manufacturer or distributor and they can’t meet your needs, then what? So it’s good to have a relationship with more than one vendor.”

In Boise, ID, Commercial Tire Inc. plays just this role. “Our goal,” says CEO Mark Hampton, “is to provide an outsource service that manages tires all the way through their life cycle. Our job is to maximize tire life. We’ve found our customers are usually pretty knowledgeable about what needs to be done and the best use of a tire. But their expertise doesn’t extend into managing all these factors all the way through the system.”

For Rasey, managing tires all the way through the system means a dealer is always on top of what’s going on in a customer’s fleet. “You should be working closely with the dealer who is using software to track tire performance. What you want is to monitor and establish a record-keeping system that will help forecast what your needs are in the future, taking into account past trends and your current fleet status. The dealer should do a thorough fleet inspection; inspect and survey all the tires; check tread depth; inspect for damage, wheel, and hardware problems; and do air-pressure checks. From this should come a list of recommendations, tires that need to be changed, repairs that need to be made, projected replacements. The idea is that these kinds of inspections and record-keeping can help the dealer work proactively to get orders in with the manufacturers and work with the retread supplier to help support end users.

“We’ve seen end users make the commitment to do this themselves, but in the hustle and bustle of daily business it doesn’t take long for that to become a secondary priority. A dealer is also going to have the knowledge and expertise to take the information they’re collecting and turn it into recommendations and information that can be used to forecast and plan. A good service dealer will keep all this information online and do periodic surveys every few weeks to monitor progress and keep up with how an operation may be changing.

“If our customers did nothing but air-pressure checks once a week minimum to make sure the tires are at their optimum air pressure, it would extend the life of their tires,” says Hampton. “We know it’s best if we do it; we know if we check air pressure regularly we won’t have to pull tires and retread them as often. We do a visual inspection of the tires to see if there’s any chunking or any other kind of damage that will affect performance or safety and we check tread depth. We don’t want to have a bald tire out there that will damage the casing. If these inspections produce anything that falls out of the specs we have negotiated with an individual fleet owner, we pull the tire, put on a new cap and casing, take the tire into our tread shop, retread it, and put it into the bank to be put back on another vehicle.”

Hampton thinks retreads are the “absolute best way for a waste hauler to go. You’re going to get three to six lives out of that tire by retreading it. And if there is ever a shortage in a specific size and wheel position, we can change an entire fleet over. Steer tires would still be an issue but that’s only two tires versus eight for a driver or a tractor.”

Racey agrees about retreads. “The fact is that integrating retreads can be an insurance policy. Using them in applications that fit your operation can be a nice hedge. Then use your tracking software to come back and see not only whether or not the strategy worked in a particular application but whether there are favorable long-term costs as well.”

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“It comes down to resources and priorities,” says Tomas Bennett, market segment manager, construction and quarries, at Michelin Earthmover, North America. “If you’re not taking care of your tires, and you have a quick failure, you’ve got automatic downtime. Often we see the tire might have been running low air-pressure and if this had been addressed in routine maintenance, they would not have had the failure. We’ve done a lot of scarp analysis over the years looking at tires and why they fail or come out of service early and we’ve been able to develop a database that documents the relationship between air pressure and tire life. If you have 100% air pressure you get 100% of your value.”

“Like every manufacturer has said since the dawn of time,” says Decker, “it’s inflation, inflation, inflation. When you have a tire like a 315/80 that’s used in the waste industry, it’s even more important. We run that tire at 10,000 pounds, and anything less than a cold inflation of 130 PSI and the tire is overloaded.” Next up according to Decker is controlled braking, making sure the slack adjusters on brakes are adjusted properly, and watching out for false positives, like exchanging a lower maintenance brake lining for the cost of tires. “When the brakes heat up,” says Decker, “there’s nowhere for the heat to go except to the beads.” Another forest-for-trees strategy is running too heavy. “A few hundred pounds may realize a significant savings in cost of transfer but much more in terms of tires and rims, brakes, hubs, bearings, and steering knuckles. Time constraints demonstrate themselves in aggressive driving tactics, hard braking and hard accelerating, which means drivers should be aware of driving practices that are detrimental to the equipment. I had one fleet that used a front loader filled to capacity to move containers around. They thought it was just an efficient use of equipment. What they weren’t aware of was they were completely overloading the tire.”

“If you catch things early,” says Junkins, “a cut that can be spot repaired, the tire can be fixed and put back in service instead of going to the scrap heap. Site maintenance is another sound management strategy. Make sure your haul roads are clear of debris that could damage a tire. I saw a tire recently that blew when the driver ran right along side a tree stump, which gorged the sidewall.

“Maintain a good set of retreads so at least if you put something through the front tire of a scraper, you’ll have something to put on to keep it running while you’re waiting for a new tire. The key for anyone running a landfill or anything having to do with off-road tires is to start thinking of tires as equipment that deserves preventive maintenance. I wish I could get everyone out there to do at least a weekly inspection and air-pressure maintenance.”

Ancillary to sound preventive maintenance is sound record-keeping. “You don’t want to be in a position,” says Racey, “where someone goes out every day and checks the air and finds that it’s consistently 5 or 10 pounds different. The good news is they’re correcting it. The bad news is there’s a problem like a bent rim or a cut in the tire that hasn’t been identified and is causing the loss of air.”

“Probably the biggest thing that the waste industry sees as a potential labor and money saver is keeping air in their tires,” says Cliff Gary, account executive to the waste industry for Bridgestone Firestone’s National Fleet Department. “The biggest problem I see, the biggest contributing factor, is where collection vehicles go in and out of landfills. We do monthly scarp-outs for a large hauler in Dallas-Fort Worth and we count how many nail holes there are in each tire. Typically, we wouldn’t go into that much detail to scrap out, but we’ve been trying to prove a point. I quit counting at 44 nails in one tire. Another thing is brake temperature. The heat gets transferred from the brake drums to the flange of the wheels to the bead of the tires and this has caused some near-fatal accidents where the tire has gotten so hot it finally just turned loose. At Bridgestone Firestone we’ve been emphasizing proper brake maintenance and educating drivers in programs we’ve been providing at Waste Management locations. We teach drivers to use the brake pedal on the floor, for example, and not the emergency valve on the dash when they’re going from mail box to mail box on residential routes. In the Dallas scarp out, I probably saw 20 tires out of 150 coming out of service prematurely for excessive brake heat.” Gary reports that at one major collection operation, 15% of tires came out of service prematurely due to brake heat–related problems.”

In Phoenix, Salyer and dealer representative Shawn Campbell at GCR Tire Centers agree with Gary about driver education. Getting back to basics, they say, is critical. “The first thing we did was return to foundations,” says Salyer, “routine air pressure and 30-second checks. The drivers are playing a more active role in maintenance; they do daily air checks and a pretrip visual inspection of their tires every morning.” Asked how he enforces this policy, Salyer replies, “You have to manage them. The perennial rule applies here: if 20% of your staff is causing 80% of your problem, you focus on that 20%. When you identify problem drivers and their usages are higher, or they’re going through more rubber, then those are the first ones in line for the training class.”

“Manage and re-train them,” says Campbell. “We go in on a quarterly basis and re-train, sometimes twice a quarter. We do five-minute training sessions talking about tires and inflation, bead failures, things of that nature. We have 1,518 wheel positions in the fleet and over the last eight months we have an average wheel position cost of $44. We have a mounted wheel program that we’re working on that allows us to spend less time with repairs and more just swapping tires. This leaves the tires to be repaired at a facility where the conditions are better. GCR does both the in-yard and off-site service.

“We have a very active partnership with our tire dealer,” says Sayler. “Shawn and I spend a lot of time together. We walk the fleet and make sure that everyone is doing what they should be doing. You have to maintain a degree of focus. If your objective is to reduce tire running cost, then you can’t take your thumb off the pulse of the fleet.”

“The program we’re describing involves changing the mindset of a fleet,” says Campbell. “We have to change the mindset of the people we’re doing business with so they start looking farther into the future.”

”There’s not going to be a short, quick fix,” says Racey. “From Bridgestone Firestone’s perspective we’re cautiously optimistic that this isn’t a bubble. The global economy is changing and hopefully that will support the additional capacities that are coming along for the long term. The bad news for fleet managers is there’s some extra effort that has to go into managing this. The good news is that with their changed business practices they’ll be able to bring some long-term savings back to the bottom line.”

Journalist Penelope Grenoble O’Malley is a frequent contributor to environmental publications.

MSW - September/October 2005