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TYREXPO INDIA
Vinod Menon, GM (in specs) and K Muralidharan, Director, CIO Tyres
presentations to major players in the market and is awaiting their response.
The firm is a specialist in retreading the tyres of heavy earthmoving equipment like dumpers, which can carry loads varying from 40 tonnes to 180 tonnes. The company has the capacity to retread mining tyres in sizes up to 14/25. “Currently we are retreading 300 – 350 big tyres per year from sizes 18/25 to 36/51,” said K Muralidharan, Director, CIO Tyres Private Limited. The company also retreads 300 small PCR and LCV tyres per month by the cold process and around 200-300 TBR tyres by hot process.
Interestingly, the company has made a new mould for tyre size 50/80.57 but has not retreaded the size as yet. “These are very big and expensive
tyres, some of the companies have recently started using them and now we are waiting for them to come to us for retreading,” informed Muralidharan.
CIO sources precure tread rubber from Kerala based tread maker Eastern Rubber, while it manufactures hot rubber at its Bihar Rubber Factory. It has a semi- automatic plant with electric and steam chambers from Rajmahaal, which can cure eight tyres per cycle. The company is planning to install one more four tyre chamber in the next six months. “The market is sluggish right now, but mines will have started opening up again and once the production cycle picks-up and we will be able to install the second chamber in six months time,” said Menon.
GPS system,” informed Mathew. The Treadsdirect franchisee is keen to offer the service on the open market once it finalises the whole system in another six months. “We believe that bigger retreaders doing 15,000 to 20,000 tyres per month in big cities like Delhi and Mumbai could be good clients,” he said.
The GPS system would help greatly as part of a cost per km system adopted by bigger fleet owners and retreaders.
tonnes of precure tread rubber each month. The plants are run on smaller autoclaves to offer quick service to fleets parked outside the retreading plants. “We are operating the plants on smaller 2 or 3 tyre chambers in order to service the trucks parked outside. As the plant is on the highway passing trucks tend to stop, give their tyre for retreading and move on by the evening,” he explained. General Tyres has plans to build a
network. “Each process is followed on the basis of time limits. The idea is to increase efficiency levels at every stage,” said Mathew. The system is integrated with mobile SMS service, with the information on each step of the process being flashed on the client’s mobile.
The whole retreading process is integrated with the GPS system. “We have bought a company for around INR 6 million that has expertise in integrating the whole process with the
Chennai city on the Mount Road and retreads around 600 tyres per month. The other two plants are located on the highways, one, located on Poonamallee Bye-Pass Road on the highway that leads to Bangalore, retreads around 750 tyres each month. The third is situated at Madhavaram on the highway leading to Andhra Pradesh and retreads 750 tyres in a month.
The three plants runs on Treadsdirect equipment and consume around 14
George Mathew with the plant manager
General Tyres Integrating Retreading with IT
Operating on smaller chambers for quick service
Stagnant market conditions have given time to one of the more prominent retreaders in Chennai to integrate and network his retreading plants with the latest information technology tools. Chennai based General Tyres claims to be the first company in India to integrate retreading with IT. “We have evolved an Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) programme to integrate various heads to efficiently
collect, store, manage and interpret data at every step of the retreading process at our three plants,” said George Mathew, Director, General Tyres.
The ERP programme involves checks at every stage of the retreading process right from bar coding the tyre on the entry into the plant to early inspection, buffing, skiving, repairing, cementing, building etc as well as including the sales and service
George Mathew, Director, General Tyres explaining the networking
“The system would keep a track on each and every detail of the vehicle,” said Mathew. “We have not seen this system in the Indian retreading industry and this is going to play an important role, especially when global players are entering the Indian retreading industry.” The company plans to implement the system in its three plants in the next six months. General Tyres has three retreading plants, strategically located around 50 km from each other. The first plant started in 1981 is in the heart of
fourth retreading plant once the market picks-up. “We will set-up the fourth plant at Maraimali Nagar, about 30 km from Chennai, once the market condition improves. There is stagnation in the market. The transport sector is quiet, though our volumes have not declined, but they are not improving either.” Currently the company’s Marimali Nagar unit is operating as service station and once the market improves it may be converted into retreading unit.
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