Targeting best practices to improve fleet uptime and productivity, Kal Tire has launched TOMS—a proprietary Tyre Operations Management System with a backbone of predictive maintenance and efficiency that it believes delivers a new standard in performance. Until now, tyre management reporting and performance tracking has been constructed around a monthly report for the mine operator with a myriad of data that looks largely at historical figures and lagging indicators for performance: inventory, consumption, past repairs, and observed conditions. The data allows for review but doesn’t provide any underpinning to look forward and change future performance. With TOMS, mine operators will have the opportunity to analyse and make decisions for their tyres and fleets using real-time performance data. With current information, decisions for today’s shift and future shifts are readily integrated into work plans and schedules.
“With TOMS, we look at making tyre management more of a proactive and predictive service, like much of the mobile equipment maintenance activities on any mine,” says Dan Allan, Senior Vice President, Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group. Representing years of experience in tyre management, TOMS launched in 2018 and is now in use on 34 open pit and underground mines across 12 countries. In addition to accessible and transparent KPI reporting and service agreement compliance, TOMS focuses on planning, predicting and prescribing maintenance rather than simply reporting on past activity. Mark Goode, Director, Business Insights, Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group, says: “The gradual rolling out of TOMS across Kal Tire mine site operations marks the start of a fundamental shift in communication with our mining customers, delivering a story that’s more relevant and tied to both fleet availability and operational productivity.”
The benefits to miners are significant, and even in the day-to-day operations it means enabling real-time insight that lets technicians and miners alike make informed decisions for that day’s shift. “For Kal Tire, a company servicing more than 150 mine sites around the world, the benefits of using TOMS, and turning internal data capabilities into customer insight, is also far-reaching. What TOMS solves internally is the need to gather and access tyre management data anywhere and to describe equipment and processes with a common language. Only then could teams leverage that data to set and compare performance benchmarks, and put their eyes on predictive maintenance and productivity. Now, with a standard language in place for everything from tyre descriptions to inspection findings, easy-to-use dashboard reporting and operational standards for inspections, rotations and more, teams around the world can share best practices and ensure tyre management and fleet operations are optimised for uptime and performance. Aggregated data from around the world benchmarks results for tyre performance, downtime, haul fleet productivity and more to identify opportunities to improve fleet use.”
“The sheer numbers of tyre-related activities Kal Tire is involved with every day should enable insight and learning,” says Allan. “Through our ‘big data’ development, we hope to identify some of these things that can add value to our customers and our manufacturer partners.” In addition to giving customers transparent dashboard-based reporting of service agreement KPI’s, TOMS has safety at its core. Kal Tire’s equipment-specific safe work procedures are incorporated directly into the program and the TOMS planning report captures the results of condition-based inspections to flag tyre-related damage that could increase operational safety risks and downtime. “With respect to the immediate potential of finding value for our customers from the data in the system, we presently capture 12,000 individual wheel position inspections into TOMS from the 34 mine sites,” says Goode. “And our intentions are to double the amount of mine sites using TOMS in the year ahead.”