DOING IT YOURSELF
Depending on your operation, you may want to outsource all your breakdowns to one of the services covered in this story, or you may want or need to handle some or all of tire breakdowns yourself.
The Internet has made it easier to handle tire breakdowns on your own. Nearly every tire maker offers a dealer locator on its web site.
"We offer a complete dealer locator that can be accessed by anybody at www.trucktires.com," says Dave Kolasinsky, manager of truck tire marketing at Bridgestone/Firestone. "If someone wants easy access to a quick and accurate locator, that will give them an up-to-date listing of the Bridgestone/Firestone dealers and truckstops in the U.S. and Canada, with associated mapping. We actually get several hundred thousand hits on that every single month."
Even Hankook Tire America, which is making a bigger push into the commercial truck tire market, offers a dealer locator on its web site. By midsummer, the company expects to have a truck-tire-specific search engine online.
In addition, the Tire Industry Assn. has an online directory of facilities offering commercial tire service at www.certifiedtireservice.com. According to the web site, TIA members are kept abreast of the latest technologies, techniques and equipment for servicing truck tires and wheels. The locator also indicates in red, which locations have invested in certification for their commercial tire service personnel.
There are also general breakdown service locator sites, such as Truckdown (www.truckdown.com) and the National Truck & Trailer Services Breakdown Directory (www.nttsbreakdown.com).
For a more sophisticated solution, Bridgestone/Firestone offers access to its Breakdown Manager system for participants in its National Fleet and Preferred Fleet purchasing programs. This is a complete, computerized system for managing, recording and reporting breakdowns. It's used via the Internet, so it doesn't add any burden to existing computer systems.
"There's a lot of interest in fleets to be able to run their own dispatching solution but use Breakdown Manager to do all the searches, case building and reporting," says Dave Kolasinsky, manager of truck tire marketing. "It really allows them to be able to afford something they couldn't normally. It would take a fleet a couple of years and at least a million dollars to build something like this out, and we make it available to our customers at an affordable price." Billing options vary, including charging by the case or licensing the software annually.
Technology, however, doesn't take the place of planning ahead.
One of the key things you can do is develop a good relationship with a local dealer, especially if you're not big enough to have a national account with one of the tire makers, says John Cooney, director of commercial sales at Yokohama.
"The best thing to do is develop a relationship with someone in the market that you trust," he says. In addition to helping you manage your tire program, your local dealer may be able to provide access to help for tire problems on the road. "The key is to build a relationship with a dealer that can help you with other networks that will help you buy tires affordably, consistently, with good service you can trust across the country."
Cooney notes that tire dealers belong to various national and regional associations, and many of these offer their customers emergency roadside assistance.
For instance, the American Commercial Tire Network was formed in 1999 in order to provide emergency road service at predictable prices for non-national account customers of several large commercial tire dealers. Today it includes 17 members that operate 300 locations and more than 1,200 service vehicles in 41 states. (www.tire-network.com).
There are regional groups, as well, such as:
• Tire One, with more than 250 dealers in five states in the upper Midwest (www.royaltire.com).
• Best One Tire & Service, with more than 170 locations in 10 states in the Midwest and Southeast (www.bestonetire.com).
• Northwest Tire Dealer Alliance, with dealers, service centers and independent service points in seven states in the Northwest (www.nwtda.com).
Tire Maintenance continued...
