Rolling on

Tyre manufacturing is a complex process where raw materials such as rubber, carbon black and chemicals produce numerous specialised components that are assembled and cured.

Traceability of various parts is an important quality function for Nokian Tyres. Traceability requires to know the history of each tyre and the components it is built from. Traditionally tracking processes have been manual which causes more errors, inaccuracy and slowness.

Many raw materials and components out of which the tyres are made, look almost identical to each other. Wrong material inputs are possible due to human errors. One false material input at an early phase of the tyre production can have an effect to wide range of products and many individual tyres. Inaccurate manual process causes a need to have a big safety margin for production recalls.

Vilant, together with RFID technology partners Confidex and Impinj, provided Nokian Tyres with an RFID solution which provides full traceability data and error prevention for millions of tyres yearly. The system tracks the whole production process from raw materials to components and to tyres.

There are hundreds of readpoints around the plant to track components. Component batches can be blocked in the software and if a user attempts to feed blocked components into a machine, the system will automatically warn the user. Vilant software creates automatically linking between raw materials, components and tyres.

Vilant software collects data of over 100 million yearly production events into a central repository. Vilant Visibility Manager provides powerful reporting tools for showing data from individual tyres, components, raw materials, machines, etc.

The solution enables

• Real-time accurate and automated traceability for tyre production
• Preventing false material inputs
• Monitoring and steering the production in real time

And presents a browser-based powerful reporting tool for displaying and modifying data.