Mobile Fitting/Tire Valet also for Car Tyres
Only a month ago NEUE REIFENZEITUNG reported at length on Mobile Fitting as a sensible and vital service in the truck tyre business. Now Goodyear-Handelssysteme GmbH, a Goodyear marketing subsidiary, plans the introduction of Mobile Fitting (known as Tire Valet in USA) for car tyres. The idea is still at an early stage. Time is money, the marketing people in Cologne believe, and aim to gain new types of customers with the new service. With marketing programmes, whose details are still to be developed, the company wants to appeal to fleet operators as well as small enterprises, self-employed people as well as private users. Run as a comprehensive service, Mobile Fitting will also be suitable to give status to the tyre dealer. Whether Mobile Fitting can be taken as far as the end user’s front door is still uncertain. In our country potentially good ideas have the nasty habit of falling foul of vetoing authorities. Nothing can be done without special permission, to be granted by each local authority individually.
Continue ReadingMIRS – Revolutionary Tyre Manufacturing Method?
Pirelli has released first details of a new manufacturing system, called MIRS (Modular Integrated Robotised System). The company is investing 250 million Euros over the next five years. A MIRS plant that can produce one million tyres a year would employ 104 people in five shifts, would occupy 3,500 sq. m. and the investment cost (excluding the building itself) would be around 45 million Euros. According to Pirelli, MIRS reduces the steps of the tyre building process from the previous 14 to only three. Instead of passing the tyres from hand to hand in the production process, the MIRS work is done by robots. Tyre type and size are fed into the computer at the beginning of production, the rest is done by the computer alone, without human interference. MIRS is therefore a kind of mini-factory with an extremely high degree of flexibility. The factory can be built anywhere where there is a market. The technology, which Pirelli does not disclose and is not prepared to share with a competitor, not even under licence, was developed by Pirelli’s research and development department in co-operation with Italian universities and the Ministry of Research and Science. A pilot plant will start work in the Bicocca factory near Milan at the end of June 2000. The Italiens claim a manufacturing cost reduction of 25 p.c. for the MIRS method compared with the traditional way, and Pirelli boss Tronchetti Provera plans to manufacture three million tyres by the new method by the year 2003, or 15 p.c. of its high and ultra-high performance tyres. If all goes to plan, it will be possible to produce five million MIRS tyres within five years.
Continue Reading
