Infor, the industry cloud company, says its artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are helping Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group greatly improve customer service and safety in its global mining business. Kal Tire is Canada’s largest independent tyre dealer and one of North America’s largest commercial tyre dealers. In addition, Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group is an international leader in mining tyre service and supply — servicing more than 150 mine sites across five continents. It has been a pioneer in applying AI technology to enable mining site operators and technicians to better plan tire maintenance and identify more ways to improve uptime and safety for mining equipment.

The Infor cloud technology platform — including Infor Operating Service (OS) and Infor Coleman AI and Machine Learning — addresses two major areas of tyre management, in particular: tyre fitment planning and visual inspection. Kal Tire’s tyre fitment planning, powered by Infor Coleman AI and Machine Learning, predicts tyre replacement time to better forecast demand at each customer site, which can help optimise fleet availability. Meanwhile, when autonomous thermal image inspections identify tyres that do not meet safety criteria, the Infor OS platform automatically generates work orders, which helps improve site productivity.

Kal Tire had begun its AI journey by integrating TOMS with Pitcrew.ai to bring autonomous detection of hot tyres, tyre separations and other damage without the vehicle needing to stop. Infor’s cloud technology layers in more automation and intelligence capabilities to the Pitcrew integration to further help miners avoid unnecessary downtime, risk, and cost.

Kal Tire anticipates that Infor OS and Infor Coleman AI/Machine Learning solutions will help it reduce downtime by 20%, with more accurate tyre forecasting, so that each site has the right quantity and mix of tyres, and more quickly detect and diagnose tyre issues with autonomous visual inspections, integrated with priority-based work order generation. “Infor, as a partner, is enabling us to move from paper, to mobile, to sensors,” said Christian Erdélyi, Tire Operations Management System (TOMS) & Implementation Manager Global at Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group. “As a result, we can go from being reactive to proactive to predictive. That’s a journey. It’ll have bumps, but the path is cleared and we’re heading down it.”

Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group believes that autonomous platforms, enabled by AI, will have the capability to do work significantly more effectively than existing processes. According to Erdélyi, Infor will help provide the “glue” or cloud technology, that site operators and technicians need to apply and scale AI to key workflows. This can help less experienced personnel, for example, make better decisions and feel more confident in the decisions they make, Erdélyi said. He adds: “We all have data, but it’s the interoperability of that data and being able to use it to make better decisions that is critical. AI is just one piece of the puzzle. What makes this solution stand out is the connectivity from sensors to system processing to the delivery of insights on mobile to our field workers and customers in a consistent, user-friendly way. The building blocks of successful use of AI is the engineering behind it and the ability to move data consistently in a usable form.”