Growing competition means testing time for tire makers

Tire makers should not overlook the importance of testing to making product development more efficient and successful, writes Theo Teunissen, Manager R&D, Tire Testing at VMI:

Epe, The Netherlands – Every company engaged in the global automotive industry has been under intense commercial, regulatory and competitive pressure for many years now. Tire manufacturers are in no way exempt from these pressures, and the impact of change has been felt most strongly in the product development space, because this is where competitive advantage is won or lost.

Tire manufacturers, like car makers more generally, are looking for ways to differentiate their products, deliver real performance advantages and reduce development cycle times in order to get products to market faster than their competitors. They are also trying to reduce cost at every stage of their development and manufacturing processes through improved operational efficiency.

Testing can sometimes be overlooked as a vital contributor to competitive performance, yet it is the key to making product development more efficient and successful.

That’s because development and testing go hand in hand at every stage, from looking for new compounds right through to trying out new tire structures and build methods. It follows that the more closely integrated and efficient the combined develop and test processes are the better the results will be: and by better results, we mean lower cost, enhanced performance and faster time to market.

Quick win

Integrating and improving test performance, therefore, is a potential quick win for tire manufacturers of every kind and is especially important for the branded, global players, which are highly dependent on product differentiation. Yet there is plenty of scope for improvement in testing, and three areas in particular could be rapidly enhanced:

Integration

No single company is able to provide best practice testing methods at every stage, but it should be possible to design each machine and process stage in such a way that they all fit together better than they do today. It is still common practice for tire manufacturers to buy different machines from a wide range of suppliers, all with different user interfaces, and with subtly different operating characteristics, and these are likely to deliver inconsistent results. We believe that manufacturers should stop thinking of testing as a “commodity” requirement and see it an essential component of an integrated development process.

Indoor testing

All tire manufacturers understand that external road testing is time-consuming and costly. It also involves inevitable variations caused by the need for individual drivers, whose different driving styles lead to inconsistent outcomes. If the industry were able to increase the proportion of testing carried out indoors it would improve the cost base and reduce the time needed significantly. This approach is known to reduce costs, improve efficiency and provide more consistent results.

Automation

Testing process stages today are often labour-intensive and “high touch”, requiring a great deal of hands-on activity from expert personnel, yet higher levels of automation can be introduced at every stage, leading to significant benefits. “Smart automation” can include use of robotics within compound testing machines (illustrated by VMI’s own LAT 100 machine) so that operators can focus on analysis and evaluation, rather than the manual labour needed to manage the machine. In the same way, elimination of drivers from most aspects of wear testing (through use of indoor machines, as described above) has a transformational impact on cost and quality of output.

So where is it possible to make the fastest and most important improvements? Where are the quick wins to be found?

Bringing testing indoors

The single most important contribution to faster development cycles, reduced time to market and consistently lower costs certainly lies in a stronger role for indoor wear testing. There have been concerns about this approach, related to the perception that indoor drum-based testing may not be as “real” as testing on either a flat-bed or on the road, itself. Yet detailed academic research suggests that a direct and predictable correlation does exist between indoor drum testing and road testing. Even before actually making tires, wear resistance properties can and should already be evaluated in the compounding lab. Key conclusions are:

•             Indoor drum testing can be very useful in predicting tire performance properties.

•             Indoor drum testing accelerates wear testing, delivering data at a much higher rate compared to conventional road testing. This means that wear testing can be carried out faster and at lower cost indoors, making it possible to try out a wider range of options during the development period.

•             Indoor drum testing provides more consistent results, simply because the test conditions, including weather and driving styles, are so well controlled test conditions.

•             Running costs are much lower, as maintenance costs for drum testing machines are inherently below those for the more sensitive and fragile flat-bed testers, and lower still than for external road tests.

•             Use of VMI’s LAT100 compound tester can reduce costs still further because of its ability to improve integration between development and testing stages, speeding up the entire process, while removing whole areas of cost in road testing and other forms of tire testing equipment.

VMI believes it is important not to be side-tracked into unprofitable discussions about the relative quality and reliability of indoor drum testing, flat-bed testing or outdoor road testing. We recognise that a final stage of testing on the road will always be essential but we also believe that, to meet the increasing requirement for speed and cost efficiency in development, it is vital to raise the proportion of predictive testing. This is a key factor in delivering accurate, relevant and consistent data much faster and at lower cost. In this way manufacturers can continue to accelerate their own product development processes and help achieve competitive advantage.

Where next?

Commercial pressures within tire manufacturing will not go away: in fact, they are likely to intensify in the next few years as a direct result of growing competition. Every manufacturer needs to look at each aspect of how they develop new products and take them to market.

The recent history of the wider automotive market shows how transformational improvements can be achieved through incremental changes, with a great many small developments adding up to major differences in quality, sophistication and efficiency. The same approach is likely to work in tire manufacturing, as well.

As manufacturers achieve higher levels of integration between process stages, introduce more automation in product and materials handling, and make optimum use of accelerated and consistent indoor test methods, so they will take time and cost out of their overall development process. That is the key to taking more new products to market, faster and at lower cost than is possible today.

In the next few years, manufacturers that are determined to stay ahead of the market will surely institute a development and testing strategy that sees seamless integration between compound selection and all the different stages of product development.

Advanced simulation technologies will be embedded at specific stages and robotics will be used much more extensively to reduce the number of touch points for human intervention. The overwhelming proportion of this increasingly fast and integrated approach will be carried out indoors, with road testing used simply to validate results and meet regulatory requirements.

In some ways testing has been the “poor relation” of the tire manufacturing industry but it will become increasingly important as manufacturers realise that competitive advantage will depend on positive changes made here. We believe that the world of tire testing will look very different in ten years’ time from today.