Reinventing Tiremaking - Pirelli - Brief Article

Automotive Industries,  July, 2000  by Angus MacKenzie

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Pirelli is launching a new modular process that will make its OEM products more cost-competitive. The roll-out strategy is aggressive.

Italian firemaker Pirelli is betting heavily on a new production system aimed at boosting the company's presence in the OEM tire market. Based on a recently unveiled manufacturing process developed in-house, Pirelli's strategy has the potential to fundamentally change the way the tire industry operates, with huge upside benefits for automakers around the world.

Pirelli CEO Marco Tronchetti Provera says he wants the new system, known as MIRS (Modular Integrated Robotized System), to account for 25 percent of the company's tire production within two years. This will be followed by a five-year, $230 million strategic roll-out of MIRS plants around the globe, including North America, beginning in 2001.

Tire have long been an anomaly in the auto industry supply chain. Although they're now more critical than ever in terms of optimizing vehicle dynamics, the process of designing and developing them still remains more of a black art than a science. Tire production also lags behind modern concepts of flexible manufacturing and just-in-time supply.

The MIRS manufacturing concept is based on a collapsible-core drum technology, first developed and patented by Pirelli in the mid-1970s. Essentially, the collapsible-core drum allows tires of different sizes and contractions to be built at a single workstation. What Pirelli has done is taken its collapsible-core drum idea, and overlaid it with a sophisticated and compact robotics package. The result is a small, flexible and highly efficient tire manufacturing module.

Traditionally, tire companies have relied on achieving vast economies of scale to offset the cost and productivity penalties inherent in the manufacturing process. Pirelli claims a MIRS module, which costs less than $50 million to install, can produce a million tires a year for 25 percent less than a traditional mid-sized plant producing six million tires a year. What's more, as each module occupies just 3,766 square feet, a MIRS plant can be installed right next to an automaker's assembly plant to facilitate just-in-time delivery.

The MIRS system is driven by software which controls the build process. Unlike conventional tire manufacturing, which requires a discontinuous series of batch building operations across 14 processing steps, MIRS builds a complete tire in just three steps. Raw rubber is heated and extruded onto the drum, which is then handed from robot to robot as different elements of the construction are required. The last building robot then physically offers the drum with the "green" tire to a machine which feeds a six-chamber revolving curing press. Instead of high pressure steam, the MIRS system uses the drum to force the tire into the curing mold. At the end of the process, the drum collapses, leaving the freshly-made tire.

The software controlling each MIRS plant is part of a package which also controls the initial design and engineering phases. When a tire's physical specifications are determined, the software automatically selects the correct mold design, choice of materials and the design of the building drum. The same software also defines the path driver for the MIRS robots and manages their work cycles.

Pirelli claims MIRS improves productivity 80 percent, compared with a traditional tire plant, and can cut inventories from six days to 72 minutes because of the continuous build process -- traditional batch building of tires means only 12 percent of the materials used are in processing at any one time. Pirelli also claims improved quality, as tire materials do not need to be cooled and reheated several times during the build process. Environmental impact is also reduced because of lower overall energy requirements, and the fact MIRS plants can now be co-located with assembly plants, reducing transportion requirements.

The first MIRS pilot plant is scheduled to begin operation later this year at Pirelli's Bicocca plant in Milan. CEO Provera says MIRS production will not be a substitute to capacity already in place.

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