So they've told me that these machines behind me will stop before they run into me.
So I'm just going to stand here and wait for this transportation machine,
a little car, to see if it actually stops.
Hopefully, it doesn't crash into me.
Five, four, three, two.
I'm hoping it doesn't hit me. What do you think?
The sensors are pretty good.
So, normally in a plant like this,
you'd have to hire 1000 people to do the kind of production that we're seeing here.
But because this is so automated they hire about 250 people,
so it's cut it down by four.
And you said this machine weighs the tires?
Yes, automatically weighs the tire.
Really?
And this machine, we are transporting green tire to the warehouse.
Okay, what is this one doing,
is it shaping the tire?
Yeah, it's shaping the tire.
This factory makes tire manufacturing look just as cool as making the iPhone.
It's amazing what these machines are doing.
You can see these big orange arms,
they're doing everything from lifting,
to weighing, to shaping,
to compressing these tires.
It's really cool.
It's not very common in this industry for
a company to produce the machines to make the products.
But Doublestar decided not just to produce the tires,
but to produce all the machines that make the tires,
and so they were able to make it exactly how they wanted it.
This kind of vertical integration,
like I said, it's not very common.
But it's helped them kind of create a niche in this space,
and be super efficient and effective in what they do.
So, normally, in this area it would take one worker to operate about six machines.
But because this is so automated,
one worker can operate about 15 machines or more.
In this area of the facility,
they're curing the tires,
it takes 40 to 50 minutes for these tires to cure,
it's a little bit warmer in here as you might imagine.
So those curing machines that we saw,
the way it works is you put the tire in there,
they use a steam to compress the tire,
and then inside that machine they have this pattern to make the tread for the tire.
So you can see the tires behind me,
when they come out of these curing machines,
they're a lot smaller, they're super compressed,
and now they come out with a nice tread that you see when you buy the tires at the store.
The storage facility here is completely
automated: you have these automated cranes and storage units,
they can move and store the tires, categorize them,
put them exactly where they need to be and
then pick them up when they need to move them on in the process.
In this area they're storing passenger car, vehicle tires.
They can store up to a 110,000 tires just in this little area alone.
You can see it's all automated.
Every tire in this facility is tracked individually.
They use some kind of computer chip or device implanted in every tire,
so they can track each one individually.
What's nice about that too,
is if you're driving with that tire on your car and you get in a wreck,
or you pop a tire or something happens,
they can track that specific tire back to how it's
manufactured and be able to replace and then service it however it's needed.
It's pretty amazing.
So we're just finished the tour of one of their facilities.
I'm here with my friends Kevin,
Jerry, and Sam from Doublestar.
You guys, this place is amazing.
Thank you.
Ready to go in. Okay, so this is their facility
where they make all the machinery for the tires that we just saw.
Interestingly, they also sell the same machines to their competitors.
So, this kind of vertical integration has allowed them to
expand the service and products they offer not just for their direct customers,
but now they're selling to their competitors.
It's pretty cool concept.
This machine right here has won many awards in the industry.
It helps build the machines to compress the tires.
This machine alone just helped them reduce manufacturing costs by 10 percent.
This machine behind me is the one they use to shape the tires.
Because they develop this machine,
they've been able to reduce the number of people on this from 3 to 1,
and it increased the quality of the tires by 60 percent. Not bad.
This is an important section of the facility here: here they do a lot of recycling,
so they can take some of the byproducts,
the wasted products that happen in the manufacturing process and recycle them.
Everything from the steel to the rubber that comes out in some of their products.
They even offer a service to companies
outside that want to bring some of their waste products here,
they can recycle their waste products.
For example, they'll take tires that didn't pass inspection
or pieces of rubber that came out in the process,
they break them down into oils to use
again for future rubber manufacturing and tire manufacturing.
So, for example, rubber in its natural state is white,
but, as you know, tires are black,
and so in this recycling process they can extract the oils,
the heavy oils that come out of these old tires,
use that oil, put it back into the manufacturing of future tires.
It's a pretty cool recycling and environmentally sustainable way to do manufacturing.
So this machine shows what happens if you put a hole in the tire.
You poke a hole in the tire,
they've got a pressure gauge there to see what happens.
You pull the nail out of the tire and guess what?
The pressure is the same.
How does that work? They've got some special rubber that
fills in the hole if you run over a nail,
so that you're not going to lose any pressure in your tire.
It's amazing. Run over as many nails as you want and keep driving.
So I could light a match?
You can put it even on fire.
Nothing happens.
Not on work.
Wow!
This is special [inaudible].
It's a fire-safe tire.
This is the biggest tire in China.
This is a real tire,
you might see this on some kind of mining equipment,
like a big caterpillar truck or something.
Doublestar can create tires from anything,
from a racing car to something like this.
Pretty amazing.
Andrew AllenDirector of Action Learning
