Would you agree that your partnership with McCarthy is a success?
Kevin Taylor: “I would. Having McCarthy handle our tire work has helped us in many ways: It has resulted in better tire management, better training, reduction of our tire inventory, reduction of our emergency road calls and reduction of downtime.
“All of those things save us money, help us cope with business conditions and improve our level of service to our customers.”
Who does the tire work now?
John Conroy: “We have a couple of our employees come out to the Pennsy premises on a regular basis. They try to do most of their work in the evening, when the equipment is ordinarily idle. They survey all the tires, evaluate their condition, perform air pressure checks and remove and replace tires as needed.
“Obviously, if there’s a tire problem reported regarding the tires on any vehicle, that gets priority, but there are fewer and fewer of those, partly because we’re performing regular maintenance and inspection, which tends to reduce tire problems.
“Once our guys work through their entire list of vehicles, they start over again.
“In the same way, we also have service trucks and employees go to the quarries to service the tires on the equipment there.”
Do you do tire work any more?
Kevin Taylor: “Not much. We sometimes have to unbolt tires and replace them in conjunction with other work, say for a brake job or something like that, but for the most part, McCarthy is handling all our tire needs.
“We had two men doing tire work, and we’ve reassigned them to other jobs. We had a primitive tire tracking system – basically 3x5 cards – that we used to manage our tires, but McCarthy now does all of this on computer, and can provide us with performance analysis to help us choose the best products.”
What are your tire priorities?
“Clearly, we want the best value, considering cost, performance and reliability, whether it’s per mile on the road trucks that deliver equipment and supplies, or per hour on our off-road and quarry equipment. All of that has to be consistent with making sure we minimize unplanned downtime.
“Downtime is enormously expensive, whether it’s at the quarries or delaying a delivery of ready-mix or asphalt to a job. You can imagine, I’m sure, but you don’t ever want to have a load of concrete start to set up in the mixer because of a tire problem.”
How can you reduce downtime and costs at the same time?
John Conroy: “That’s part of what our fleet survey for Pennsy helped us do. If you aren’t using the very best tire for each job, and if you aren’t maintaining those tires in optimum condition, it costs you.
“You end up needing more tires. You have more downtime. You need a bigger inventory to cover unforeseen problems. By really analyzing tire performance, you can figure out which new tire and retread products to use and how to maintain them for best performance.
“Pennsy has the foresight to see that the way to control costs is not to slash the acquisition cost of tires, but to cut cost per mile or hour and ultimately, the ‘cradle-to-grave’ cost of each tire.
“That’s why all this works, because we’re not trying to save money by using cheaper tires, but instead, by using better tires and taking better care of them.”
What kinds of changes have you made?
“We’ve figured out the best mix of tires for Pennsy’s vehicles. For example, on the ready-mix trucks, we’ve pretty much standardized on either the Bridgestone M860 or M844F for the front axles and the Bandag BDM for the rears. For lift axles, we generally go with Bandag ECL SST or WBR, depending on the size we need. Of course, we make all these Bandag retreads in our own plant.
“The mixers usually come from the OEM with Bridgestone M726 EL on the rears. Sometimes, we’ll run those until they wear out, but when we have a good supply of retreads, we might replace those with the Bandag BDM right away and move the M726 ELs to Pennsy’s ‘road trucks’ that spend most of their time going to and from job sites. Those road trucks will generally have either Bridgestone R250F or M843 tires on the steers.
“The same sort of thing is happening with the quarry and earthmoving equipment. We’re using a lot of Bridgestone off-road radial and Firestone bias tires, along with Bandag Continuum retreads we make in our off-road retread plant in Somerset, Pennsylvania, about two hours from here.”
Editor’s Note: We took the opportunity to visit McCarthy’s Somerset, Pennsylvania off-road retread plant, and will bring you that story in a future issue of Real Answers magazine.
It sounds like McCarthy’s providing really “full service” when it comes to tire work.
Kevin Taylor: “That’s what we want. We take care of the stuff we do well. In our shop, we handle all our brake work, suspension work, maintenance, engine repairs and overhauls. We even do our own state equipment safety inspections.
“And obviously, we do a good job with the materials, from mining the stone to mastering the science of creating custom mixes of concrete and asphalt, delivering it to customers and jobs – and even installing it.
“We haul our own equipment (and sometimes, equipment for our customers) to and from job sites. But when it comes to tires, we rely on McCarthy.”
Have there been some unusual things you’ve done with tires?
“One important thing we were able to do was to decrease our inventory of tires. That’s an immediate benefit to our bottom line. And, we’ve had to cope with some unusual situations. From time to time, there have been shortages, especially in off-road tire supplies.
“McCarthy has helped us a great deal with that. In some cases, we’ve even gone so far as to have McCarthy remove tires from vehicles that are scheduled for maintenance and temporarily re-install those tires on other vehicles.
“That way, we’ve kept machines from being idled without having to have lots of extra tires. In other cases, we might have too few tires at one location and have extras in another. McCarthy has helped us, first of all, keep track of those tires, so we know where the needs and the extras are, and then to move tires where they are needed. That’s a big help.”
Is there an overall reason why this is working so well?
John Conroy: “I truly believe what we’ve created here is a partnership of Pennsy, BBTS and McCarthy Tire in which all three of us have a vested interest in Pennsy’s success.
“You know, sometimes you hear customers say they feel they have to use multiple tire suppliers ‘to keep everybody honest,’ but in my view, if everybody recognizes that their best interest lies in the customer’s success, as we do, there’s no need to do that.
“If all you want to do is sell tires, the way I see it, you’d better count on looking for a new customer every six months to two years. If what you want to do is create a mutually beneficial relationship, then create a long-term partnership with your customer where everybody benefits.
“What we’ve tried to do for Pennsy is create a situation in which everybody at Pennsy can sleep easier, because all it takes is a single call to us for a solution to almost any tire-related problem.
“And, with the tire management services we’ve been able to provide to Pennsy, we’ve actually helped reduce the number of problems they have to call us about.”
Would you agree with that, Kevin?
Kevin Taylor: “I would. I’ve already got a ‘3-ring circus’ to manage here. Working with John Conroy of McCarthy and Bruce Couch of Bridgestone Bandag takes a lot of the burden of that circus off my shoulders. And, overall, it has saved us money while increasing both our uptime and the service we are able to provide to our customers. All that makes this partnership a success for all of us.”
Bruce Couch of BBTS,
Kevin Taylor of Pennsy Supply and
John Conroy of McCarthy Tire
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