Tracking Tire Costs Per Mile
Evan Lockridge
Contributing Editor
With operating costs always on the rise, it's natural to search out less-expensive products and services. But you need to look beyond the purchase price. A less-expensive tire may give you fewer in-service miles than a more expensive one.
So how can you figure out which tires give you more bang for your buck? One way is to calculate your tire costs per mile.
"If you don't have a way to account for the performance of the product in an objective manner, you're always going to be stuck buying on price," says Guy Walenga, Bridgestone's engineering manager for commercial products in North America. "If you're buying only on price, you are probably never getting your money's worth."
The simplest way to figure tire cost per mile is to take the purchase price of a tire and divide that by the difference between the original miles and the removal miles, says Donn Kramer, director of marketing, commercial tire systems at Goodyear.
If you retread tires, you have to add the retread mileage and costs to the equation. Some fleets also add in mounting and dismounting costs over the life of a tire. You may want to track repair costs, adjustment credits from tire makers and retreaders, scrap disposal – "anything associated with the costs and use of the tire through its life," says Michael Burroughes, product manager for Michelin.
Good records are key to making this process work. But if you don't already track tire cost information, the good news is, you don't have to start gathering such data on every tire in your fleet. Instead, you can use a representative sample. Kramer recommends 5 percent to 10 percent of your fleet, while Walenga says in a fleet with 100 tractors, 15 should suffice. The key is making sure this representative sample truly reflects your entire fleet, including applications, tire brands, sizes and tread designs. If your fleet has specific applications that are quite different, then you need a representative sample for each application.
If you have a small number of trucks, you can record and analyze this data the old-fashioned way – with pencil and paper and calculator. For most fleets, though, computers are the best way to go. You can design your own tracking system using a standard database program, or you can use vehicle maintenance record-keeping software or a tire-specific software package. Make sure the system allows you to input data such as tire sizes, price, mileages, dates, inspections and so forth. Some general maintenance programs, Walenga warns, have room for nothing more than tire size and cost.
You'll need a way to identify and track specific tires. In the future, this may get easier, with RFID tags embedded in tires.
Once you have a baseline of your costs, then you can start testing different tires and processes to see what will save you money.
If all this seems a little daunting, tire makers offer assistance in determining your tire cost per mile. They can help you figure out which tire is truly best for your operation, even if it's a competitor's tire.
For instance, within Michelin is a group called Michelin Business Solutions. "One of the greatest successes they have had is going into fleets on a consultative basis and engaging in a [tire] cost-reduction program," Burroughes says. Such a program includes analyzing a fleet's ongoing tire practices and not only recommending best practices, but also ways to make sure these recommendations are being followed. "If the recommendations are followed, the payback is very tangible and very measurable," he says.
Goodyear offers similar consultative services, as well as software that fleets can use, either with help from company representatives or on their own. One, Tire Vehicle Tracking – or TVTrack – helps fleets gather and organize tire data and determine tire operating costs per mile. Another one, Tire Value Calc, helps determine what kind of tire configuration might be the best for a fleet based on estimated tire costs.
"For example, a fleet may want to run Goodyear tires on the drives and Michelin tires on steers," Kramer says. "We can then determine operating cost per mile, or we could go to a different scenario with different tire manufacturers' products and give a fleet a good representation of their estimated tire costs and what the savings might be," says Goodyear's Kramer.
Bridgestone also works with fleets, using special software to help fleets track tire performance and cost per mile, including comparisons between their tires and competitors.
Walenga notes that no matter how you choose to track tire costs per mile, the real key to making any program work is to have good tire maintenance practices to begin with.
"Every opportunity you have, whether you are tracking tire performance or not, put an air pressure gauge on the tires and keep them maintained. That's going to produce your best cost per mile, no matter what kind of tire you are using."
