Construction fleets operate in demanding environments that contribute to increased wear and tear on tires, making tire management a vital piece of overall maintenance management. Blowouts not only disrupt operations, they pose safety risks and can lead to costly repairs.

Tire prices in general have been rising since at least 2021, according to the federal reserve bank of St. Louis’ producer price index by industry, adding additional strain to fleet budgets. These increases continued throughout 2023 and are projected to keep going into this year. On top of that, tire shortages have been reported every year since the pandemic started, which can further affect prices as well as cause service delays.

Effective tire management gives construction businesses a measure of control, both in proactively addressing potential tire issues and being able to respond quickly when a potential issue becomes more of an immediate problem.

BEING PROACTIVE

For construction fleets, proactive tire management is paramount to reducing service costs, but to really get the most out of an asset’s tires requires analyzing related data, such as tread depth, air pressure, mileage and age, which can be a cumbersome task when done manually.

Still, monitoring these key tire health metrics is a worthy endeavor, as it can help fleets identify potential issues before they escalate. Staying ahead of tire wear and tear can also improve safety on the road and at the jobsite, and mitigate the risk of blowouts.

Naturally, blowouts aren’t completely unavoidable. An action that should fall squarely under the umbrella of tire management is response planning. This helps ensure no additional damage to the asset is done, but it also allows operators to get back up and running faster to avoid major job delays. Standardization is a great way to speed up tire replacement and repairs.

“We like to use the same types of equipment [...] If we buy a Volvo loader for the farm, we like to buy a Volvo loader for construction and for maintenance so that we’ve got those parts on the shelf,” says Herman VanDenBogaert, fleet and raw materials purchasing manager at Cherrylake, a landscaping and construction company based out of central Florida. “That cuts down on time to repair. If an operator says they need a tire, we already have one mounted to a wheel here in the shop—we just take the whole thing out there, jack it up, switch it out and bring the other one back.”

SOFTWARE

Fleet-management software offers construction fleets a more automated solution to tire management. With FMS, fleets can maintain detailed service histories for their tires, including installation and rotation dates, as well as mileage at time of service. Not only can fleets use this information to monitor tire health, they can use it to track performance and durability trends so they know what holds up best to the daily grind. The data also provides cost saving opportunities by shedding light on poor performing tire brands or types. Armed with this insight, construction fleets can make informed decisions when purchasing tires, selecting options that offer the best return on investment over their lifecycle.

Access to robust fleet data facilitates proactive—and effective—maintenance scheduling and issue prioritization to reduce tire-related downtime. While managers can’t be everywhere construction assets are all the time, FMS empowers operators to update tire information and submit issues using the software’s native mobile application. Managers can view the submission in real time to assess whether the issue is critical or something that can be safely put off until the end of the shift.

Fleets can dive even deeper into tire-maintenance and management records to see how and when tires are serviced, down to the exact axle and position they're installed on. This makes it easier to see unnatural wear trends that could indicate a larger issue and can highlight inefficiencies in tire balancing and rotation and alignment schedules.

Tire management in FMS can also help improve tire inventories to ensure fleets servicing assets in house have the parts available when they need them. Technicians can add tires directly from the inventory to digital work orders, which automatically adjusts inventory quantities. An auto-reorder threshold can even be set so that tires are reordered when stock quantities reach a specified number.

Opting to use FMS for tire management affords construction fleets additional benefits, as well. FMS provides integration and public application programming interface features that automatically consolidate data from connected solutions, including telematics and other fleet and business solutions. Because FMS automatically aggregates data on the back end, managers and other stakeholders can quickly view snapshots, as well as detailed reports, of key metrics, including inspection compliance rates, tire issue alerts and more.

FMS provides a consolidated dashboard that can be customized to show the metrics most important to the daily workflow, such as asset status, work-order status, open purchase orders and critical issues. Fleets can also take advantage of user permissions in FMS to ensure clean data while reducing data overload.

Although it can be a bit of a burden when done manually—or using siloed data—tire management doesn’t have to be so tiresome. Implementing proactive tire-management practices and leveraging FMS to automate data capture, consolidation and aggregation can help fleets minimize downtime, reduce maintenance costs and improve tire ROI.