Infor, the industry cloud company, announced that Infor’s artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are helping Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group greatly improve customer service and safety in its global mining business.
Kal Tire is Canada’s largest independent tire dealer and one of North America’s largest commercial tire dealers. In addition, Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group is an international leader in mining tire service and supply — servicing more than 150 mine sites across five continents.
Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group has been a pioneer in applying AI technology to enable mining site operators and technicians to better plan tire maintenance and identify more ways to improve uptime and safety for mining equipment.
The Infor cloud technology platform — including Infor Operating Service (OS) and Infor Coleman AI and Machine Learning — addresses two major areas of tire management, in particular: tire fitment planning and visual inspection. Kal Tire’s tire fitment planning, powered by Infor Coleman AI and Machine Learning, predicts tire replacement time to better forecast demand at each customer site, which can help optimize fleet availability. Meanwhile, when autonomous thermal image inspections identify tires that do not meet safety criteria, the Infor OS platform automatically generates work orders, which helps improve site productivity.
Kal Tire anticipates that Infor OS and Infor Coleman AI/Machine Learning solutions will help Kal Tire:
- Reduce downtime by 20 percent, with more accurate tire forecasting, so that each site has the right quantity and mix of tires, and
- More quickly detect and diagnose tire issues with autonomous visual inspections, integrated with priority-based work order generation.
“Infor, as a partner, is enabling us to move from paper, to mobile, to sensors,” said Christian Erdélyi, tire operations management system (toms) & implementation manager global at Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group. “As a result, we can go from being reactive to proactive to predictive. That’s a journey. It’ll have bumps, but the path is cleared and we’re heading down it.”
Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group believes that autonomous platforms, enabled by AI, will have the capability to do work significantly more effectively than existing processes. According to Erdélyi, Infor will help provide the “glue,” or cloud technology, that site operators and technicians need to apply and scale AI to key workflows. This can help less experienced personnel, for example, make better decisions and feel more confident in the decisions they make, Erdélyi said.
