Unless you do the math, you may not realize that after labor and fuel, tires are your third-highest operating cost on a wheeled piece of heavy equipment. So starting a simple maintenance and management program could save you substantial amounts of money.
Creating a tire maintenance and management program may seem like an administrative burden for a small company with a limited fleet, but even a little effort can yield big savings. “If you are not able to look at your tires daily and manage them in that manner, you need to move into a tire maintenance and management program,” says Johni Francis, global OTR product manager for Titan International.
There is a perception that tire maintenance and management programs are more suited to the big fleets than small contractors, but Chris Rhoades, manager of engineering and training for BKT tires, turns that myth on its head. “For the small operator a $6,000 tire is really important,” he says. “It’s just as important to the small contractor as it is the big companies, if not more so. They have to move a lot of material to make up that loss.”
The benefits of a tire maintenance management program can be gleaned whenever a fleet has two or more pieces of equipment that use the same size and type of tires, says Tom Clauer, senior manager of commercial and OTR product planning at Yokohama Tire. Managing your tires can be as simple as setting up a rotation schedule or retreading cycle, or it can be more in-depth by using data-intensive, cloud-based analysis programs, he says.
Basically there are three steps to a successful tire maintenance management program: track your tires, seek expert advice from your tire vendors and coach your operators.
