Tire Monitoring at its Best
Did you know that a properly inflated tire not only reduces tread wear and avoids downtimes but also saves you one percent on fuel compared to a tire that is just ten percent underinflated?
It doesn’t sound that much? Then just imagine the savings a fleet manager dealing with thousands of vehicles daily can make. Especially in the construction industry, where every day costs extra money, the monitoring of tire conditions becomes particularly important. For this reason, we at Continental have been working on ContiConnect, a digital tire monitoring software that enables our partners, such as Schlüter Baumaschinen GmbH, to constantly keep track of their equipment and thus maximize uptime, safety and sustainability.
But before we delve deeper into this technology, we need to understand the complex field of work in which our partners operate. So, let's take a closer look at the challenges first. The construction business is known to work beyond scope due to its high complexity, although maintaining schedules is especially critical in the construction business.
Nevertheless, the problems are manifold. On the one hand, we have several stakeholders with diverging expectations and organizational setups that are complicating the overall process. Added to this, we are confronted with an increased process complexity. Usually, thousands of processes take place simultaneously and even influence each other. A failure, for example, a flat tire of a supplier vehicle, can lead to a standstill at the quarry and cost operators up to several tens of thousands of euros daily. And this is no exception. Heavy machinery, excavators, and dump trucks work under extreme working conditions. Whether soft, marshy ground or gravel and rock soils, tire damage is not unlikely in this field. But also, minor damages can trigger a costly chain reaction.
"If tire pressure is on average 10 percent too low, tread wear is 10 percent higher and the service life of the carcass up to 15 percent shorter. At the same time, incorrect tire pressure also means higher fuel consumption."
To minimize inefficiencies like that, our partner Schlüter Baumaschinen GmbH works with our digital tire monitoring system ContiConnect Live, which optimizes processes at their construction sites and even ensures a longer service life of earthmoving tires as one example.
At Continental, we are always in close contact with the market to gain valuable insights into the needs of our stakeholders. That is why we are constantly seeking strong partners to realize disruptive pilot projects shaping the construction site 2030. Thanks to the honest and open feedback of our partners and our expertise from other areas, such as the automotive business, we create tailor-made solutions developed from the user’s perspective to provide operators with the right information at the right time.
One of these innovative solutions is the digital tire monitoring software ContiConnect Live, which we have already introduced in an earlier blog article about material handling. The main advantage of this solution is that it enables fleet managers and partners such as Schlüter Baumaschinen GmbH to monitor the conditions of their vehicles’ tires, such as the pressure or temperature, centrally regardless of their location. The data is then sent to the Continental cloud using the Vodafone data card before it gets transmitted to the ContiConnect web portal. This way malfunctions can be identified early on, avoiding unnecessary downtimes and, therefore, avoidable costs.
"Since we started using ContiConnect Live, we have been able to reduce our maintenance costs and intervene in the event of an imminent loss of tire pressure before any major damage can occur."
Despite this positive feedback, we at Continental always go one step further. We understand ourselves as the partners of the on-site workers. Therefore, we continuously aim to develop products and solutions that make their work easier and safer. For this reason, we have also further improved our digital tire monitoring technology, which impresses with a new web portal and app. ContiConnect 2.0 will be presented at this year’s bauma.
Construction sites in the future will be characterized by seamless communication integrating different processes based on a shared data set to ensure not only efficiency but also safety for all parties involved.
Hereby, we rely on our:
But ContiConnect Live is only the first step towards realizing that vision, many more lie ahead. That's why especially the last aspect of “strong partnerships” is important to us. Shaping the future hand in hand with our partners is a win-win situation for all of us. Together, we can create technological innovations that increase the level of safety and sustainability on construction sites, simplify processes, and increase the speed of completion of construction sites, reflecting positively on our profit pools and creating added value for our overall economy.
Julia Reinhold
Spokesperson Commercial Specialty Tires
Phone: +49 (0) 511 938 23965
Mail: julia.reinhold@conti.de
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