Bridging the intralogistics gap in modern tire manufacturing

Tire manufacturing requires a critical decoupling point between continuous component production and multi-stream assembly. Implementing an automated cassette storage system driven by Pesmel’s Material Flow How® approach bridges this intralogistics gap, ensuring 100% material availability and maximizing floor space.

Understanding complex tire intralogistics

Modern tire manufacturing is a highly sophisticated assembly operation. A single tire can consist of more than 14 distinct semi-finished components. Furthermore, SKU diversity is expanding rapidly; the compounds and structural layers required for a premium, high-speed sports tire differ drastically from those used in standard passenger car radials. This immense variation dictates complex material flows on the factory floor, requiring rigorous quality control and precise component routing and timing.

Recognizing the assembly bottleneck

Tire manufacturing relies on converging multiple disconnected production streams. You cannot establish a direct, one-to-one physical link between component creation and final assembly. For instance, a facility may operate a single, high speed extrusion line that is simultaneously responsible for feeding up to 30 individual tire building machines. This architectural disparity between high-throughput component generation and distributed assembly creates a severe intralogistics bottleneck.

Addressing the need for intelligent decoupling

Because direct feeding is physically impossible and inherently inefficient, facilities must implement a strategic decoupling point. An intelligent intermediate buffer becomes the beating heart of the plant’s supply chain.

Semi-finished strips (like innerliner, body plies, steel belts, and treads) are spooled onto heavy metal cassettes, they require a highly organized temporary home. Without an intelligent buffering strategy, these multi-stream components create chaotic traffic jams, leading to lost materials, manual handling damage, and costly assembly machine downtime.

An intelligent intermediate buffer becomes the beating heart of the plant’s supply chain – preventing chaotic traffic jams, lost materials, and costly downtime.

Presenting the solution

To conquer this bottleneck, industry leaders are turning to specialized automated intralogistics. Pesmel delivers value to this intermediate phase with its proprietary Material Flow How® concept. Instead of relying on manual floor buffering, Pesmel offers an automated cassette storage solution (AS/RS) purpose-built for the tire industry’s spooled semi-finished materials.

Located centrally within the production environment, this high-density cassette storage operates as a dynamic material library. By eliminating manual handling, the Material Flow How® approach condenses the storage footprint while safely housing sensitive rubber components.

End-to-end material flow control with Material Flow WMS

Hardware alone cannot solve complex intralogistics challenges; it requires a single, intelligent brain to synchronize the physical movements across the entire facility. Pesmel’s proprietary Material Flow WMS (Warehouse Management System) acts as this central control hub, managing seamlessly integrated material flows all the way from primary extruders to final tire building machines.

Unlike traditional, siloed software, the Material Flow WMS combines full Warehouse Management (WMS) and Warehouse Control System (WCS) functionalities into a unified architecture. Key capabilities include:

Seamless enterprise integration: The WMS integrates directly with top-level production planning systems – such as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). It receives dynamic production schedules and component requests, instantly translating them into optimized physical transport orders.

Unified hardware control: Pesmel’s software acts as a single integration layer for all material handling automation. It directly orchestrates AS/RS stacker cranes, conveyor lines, and AGVs – eliminating disjointed control systems and simplifying software architecture.

Full inventory transparency & traceability: In tire manufacturing, rubber compounds have strict operational shelf-lives and aging limits. The Material Flow WMS tracks every individual cassette and semi-finished SKU in real-time. It enforces FIFO (First-In, First-Out) protocols, monitors compound maturation times, and guarantees 100% material traceability from extrusion to assembly.

Built-in digital twin technology: Pesmel Material Flow WMS is built alongside an integrated WMS Digital Twin. By running real-time 3D simulations based on actual production data, the digital twin allows plant managers to validate operational strategies, eliminate bottlenecks before they occur, perform virtual system commissioning, and continuously optimize overall plant throughput.

Flexible integration: greenfield projects and brownfield retrofits

A major advantage of this automated cassette storage design is its footprint adaptability. The high-density system can be seamlessly integrated into brand-new, greenfield factory layouts or retrofitted directly inside existing production facilities.

In brownfield projects where vertical clearance or floor space is tightly constrained by legacy infrastructure, the high-density storage layout allows manufacturers to maximize internal cubic volume without requiring costly building expansions. Whether modernizing an operating facility or designing a next-generation plant from scratch, the system adapts to the structural boundaries of the building. Crucially, by consolidating footprint-heavy, manual floor storage into a compact, high-bay automated cassette system, brownfield facilities liberate valuable plant floor space. This newly reclaimed footprint can directly accommodate additional manufacturing and assembly lines – enabling manufacturers to scale up total plant production capacity without constructing a single new square meter of factory building.

Direct extruder connections and AGV-driven assembly

To achieve full end-to-end automation, the intermediate buffer interfaces directly with both upstream production and downstream assembly:

Direct conveyor links to extruders: Where spatial layouts allow, automated conveyor systems can be connected directly to extruders and calendering lines. Cassettes are automatically loaded and dispatched straight into the high-density AS/RS buffer without manual intervention, eliminating early-stage transport delays.

AGV logistics to tire building machines: For downstream delivery, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) can be deployed to bridge the final gap between the central AS/RS and individual tire building machines. Once a specific cassette is called by the production schedule, the storage system retrieves it and hands it off to an AGV, which delivers the exact cassette directly to the target assembly station precisely on time.

Synchronizing factory operations

Mastering tire intralogistics requires perfect synchronization between component availability and machine demand. Pesmel’s automated cassette storage guarantees total traceability and 100% material availability, automatically retrieving and deploying the exact material wagon to the specific assembly machine the moment it is required.

By eliminating the chaos of manual floor storage, tire manufacturers can drastically reduce Work-In-Progress (WIP) inventory, protect delicate semi-finished goods from deformation, and ensure multi-stream assembly operations run flawlessly at peak capacity.

For more information, please contact:
Samu Rantala
samu.rantala@pesmel.com