Bridgestone to invest $41 million in Europe to enhance manufacturing

BRUSSELS, Belgium—Bridgestone Corp. is committing $41 million throughout the coming four years to digitize the manufacturing processes at its eight European plants with a goal of more quickly and flexibly meeting "evolving" customer demands.

The investment will cover training for Bridgestone employees in the firm's European/Middle East/Africa division, and will allow them to operate digital technologies that are designed to help improve resource efficiency and job satisfaction.

The smart factory project will transform the production process—covering manufacturing semi-finished products, energy supply, maintenance, production monitoring and production planning—at plants in France, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Spain, Bridgestone said.

The improvements also will address energy savings, efficiency increases, waste reduction and process simplification.

The first of the projects scheduled, dubbed "Smart Energy," will focus on optimizing the plants' energy consumption and costs, with a goal of cutting energy consumption by about 10 percent, Bridgestone said.

The Smart Energy system creates a link between the production plans and energy consumption, and modeling these will optimize the energy requirement of tire production.

The digitalization of the plants will enable the data from tire production to be stored, analyzed and used by Bridgestone engineers at tech centers in Rome and Tokyo, and ultimately will help to improve tire design. The digitized tire model designs, in turn, will be used to cut the production time of the first series of the new tires in half, Bridgestone said.

Digitalization also will help Bridgestone improve manufacturing efficiency by enabling "smart maintenance" of the plants' facilities. Artificial intelligence will be used to analyze data and forecast potential faults in machinery, for example.

The system will measure and analyze key parameters of the machinery with the help of sensors, and will suggest maintenance to avoid costly malfunctions. This new process also will help to optimize the planning of maintenance cycles.

The smart factory investment is designed to help Bridgestone reduce waste throughout the EMEA system by looking for connections between production parameters and the features of the manufactured tires. On-site teams will be tasked with finding ways to reduce the number of production rejects using the data collected.

The company also anticipates its logistics processes will be simplified considerably, thus streamlinging production planning and administrative processes, from mixing materials to warehousing.

This investment follows earlier initiatives to digitize the production process, Bridgestone said, such as the use of Examation, an artificial intelligence-based manufacturing technology that measures and checks quality parameters at 480 points—collecting 700 MB of data per tire.

"This smart factory project will go a long way in making Bridgestone EMEA future ready," Adolfo Llorens, vice president, manufacturing, said, noting that the digital processes should help improve quality by 15 percent.