Hitting the Road with Bridgestone: Labor, Automation and What’s Next for Tire Logistics

In this episode, join Brad Blizzard, Vice President, Logistics Operations and Product Delivery at Bridgestone, and Bob Boehm, Vice President of Operations at DHL Supply Chain, as they discuss their careers in logistics, industry changes, autonomous guided vehicle (AGV) implementation and our partnership between Bridgestone and DHL.  

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):

Welcome to All Business, no Boundaries, a collection of supply chain stories by DHL Supply Chain, the North American leader in contract logistics. I'm your host, will Haywood. This is a place for in-depth discussions on the supply chain, challenges keeping you up at night. We're breaking beyond the boundaries that are limiting your supply chain. Today's episode is hitting the Road with Bridgestone Labor Automation, and what's next for Tire logistics. Our guests are Brad Blizzard, vice President, logistics operations, and product delivery from Bridgestone. And Bob Bame, vice president of operations, DHL Supply Chain. Let's dive in. Bob. Brad, welcome to you both. Happy to see you this morning, and I've been really looking forward to this recording. So we're going to start like we normally do. I'm going to ask each of you to introduce yourselves. So your name, your role in your company, and how long you've been in your current role, if you could. So Brad, why don't we start with you?

Speaker 2 (01:04):

Sure, yeah, great to be here guys. So my title is Vice President of Logistics, operations and Product Delivery. So if you think about it, as soon as our tire is produced or an import container hits the port, my team is responsible for getting those tires through our network and to our final customers. So all of our freight warehousing. And we also are responsible for order management on the commercial side of our business. So really fulfillment, it's a fulfillment role in an operations role combined. And I've been with Bridgestone, yeah, yeah, I've been with Bridgestone nine years and prior to that all CPG, so I say all the time, man, tires ain't toothpaste. It's a lot different handling tires than it is something in a nice corrugated box. It stacks nicely on a pallet. So it's been a challenging and rewarding nine years for

Speaker 1 (02:01):

Sure. Yeah, great. And I want to talk about that in a little more detail in a minute. But first, Bob, why don't you introduce yourself?

Speaker 3 (02:08):

Yeah, good morning, will Bob Bain? I am VP E of operations for our automotive group. Been with the company 27 years, moved around a little bit. I started in our technology group and then moved into automotive where I started working in tires back in 2000. And in the middle there I jumped to our consumer sector for about five years and then have come back here about eight years ago leading our tire group and our tire vertical, I guess we would call it, and started working with Brad a couple years ago, the Bridgestone team.

Speaker 1 (02:53):

Great. So Brad Blizzard, Bob Bame, and Bridgestone. That's a lot of bees for one episode. So I want to talk about the relationship between Bridgestone and DHL and sort of the history there. So maybe Brad, if you could start out with where did it all start and how has it evolved? And then Bob, feel free to chime in from your seat.

Speaker 3 (03:15):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (03:17):

Yeah, sure. So I've had relationships throughout my career with DHL off and on different companies, but as far as Bridgestone goes, we opened a new distribution center outside of Toronto, Canada about four years ago, three or four years ago, Bob, I can't even remember. It seems like 15. And we run all of our distribution centers for the most part. And we decided that we were going to, particularly in Canada, it's a different market. Labors can be interesting up there. We decided to look at having a three PL manage that facility for us, and that's where we brought DHL in to run that facility for us. And we started up during Covid, so that was interesting. We couldn't send anybody up there to train the DHL folks. And so we did everything over the computer, over the phone and DHL just did a great job getting that operation started during a very difficult time. And then a couple of years ago, we were having issues at our Aiken factory warehouse. We produce 33,000 tires a day in Aiken. It's a huge operation, our largest domestic factory. And we had another three PL and that building weren't happy with the performance and so we brought in DHL because they were doing such a good job in Toronto Forest, and we know that DHL knows tires. And so we brought DHL into our Aiken factory warehouse about two years ago to run that operation as well.

Speaker 1 (04:59):

Okay. And Aiken is a factory, you said? Do you have other factories in North America or is that your sole one?

Speaker 2 (05:08):

Oh, we do. So domestic, we have a factory in Joliet, Canada, which is where I was this week. We have Aiken, South Carolina, passenger tires. We have Wilson, North Carolina passenger tires, and then from a commercial standpoint, truck and bus tires. We have large factories in Laverne, Tennessee, Warren County, Tennessee, and then we make giant tires, 13 foot tires in Bloomington, Illinois, and Aiken, South Carolina as well.

Speaker 1 (05:37):

Okay, great. Great. So Bob, what's your take on the Bridgestone startup? Sounds like some interesting circumstances with covid, an international border, sort of a first time outsourcer it sounds like. What was it like for DHL?

Speaker 3 (05:55):

Yeah, so it was a challenge. We thought it was going to be a standard open the building. There was going to be a lot of collaboration. We were having great relationship Covid hit, I think we had one cross border training we did with the team in Chicago, and then everything shut down. We couldn't get across the border, we couldn't get anybody up there. So as Brad said, we did all the training remotely via teams, via calls. It was probably one of the oddest startups we've done, but I think we were pretty successful. We had some hiccups along the way. There's some building challenges that came with people not being available to work because of Covid, but we kind of managed our way through all that and I think started bringing tires in there and people were learning on the fly. And we did bring in some tire ready people from the DHL team that had worked in some of our other tire counts and the other parts of Canada. That was probably more the challenge. And Aiken was just understanding Bridgestone's expectations, getting the team there turned around as far as changing the culture really in Aiken was the biggest part down there. So

Speaker 2 (07:26):

Yeah, Aiken Aiken was a huge success for us. We constantly had issues with turnover with teammates and getting enough people there to keep up with production and DHL came in and just fixed all that. The culture I think was the big thing and they've done a fantastic job getting that operation turned around.

Speaker 1 (07:46):

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, thank you both for that. I want to talk about the challenges associated with the difficult commodity tires, and I wondered if we could spend a minute or two with you guys just describing what a tire distribution operation looks like. I don't think unless you step into one of these facilities, you really can appreciate the volume, the weight of the commodity, the different sizes. I mean, Brad, you said 13 foot tires. It is something to behold. So can you tell us sort of what it looks like, what it smells like, how the tires get stored and moved and what the human effort is in running these facilities?

Speaker 2 (08:38):

Sure. Like I said, my background CPG and everything was in a nice corrugated box and stacked nicely on a pallet. Well, tires, when we ship tires, when we move tires around the network, we load those on the floor and what we call pasture tires. We lace those tires or fish bowing those tires on the floor all the way up to the ceiling and it's done by hand. It's manual labor. We outsource a lot of that to third parties as well at our distribution centers. But it's extremely challenging from a labor standpoint. It takes a lot of labor to unload and load tires.

(09:18):

A lot of carriers aren't thrilled with carrying tires because of the rubber odor in the trailer and they can't do a back haul with Kellogg's or Quake Oats or anybody that wants to put food in that trailer. So it limits our flexibility a lot in terms of what we can do outside of our four walls. But the tires come in laced from the floor to the ceiling. We unload those by hand, put 'em on a conveyor, stack 'em on a pallet and put 'em away in racks in our warehouses. So we do rack those in the warehouse, just stack them up.

(09:55):

But it's certainly been a learning experience for me. I thought I would come into the tire business and walk into one of our distribution centers. It would be just kind dirty and dark and it's tires. I mean, you could eat off the As is. It's as clean and organized as a cereal warehouse, a Coca-Cola warehouse, some of the other companies I've worked for. And so I can't speak for other tire companies, but I know at Bridgestone we take a lot of pride in quality and processes and I've just been totally impressed with the tire business in terms of how we manage the processes in those tires.

Speaker 1 (10:44):

Yeah, great. So Bob, you look after a number of customers that are tire manufacturers. What are your observations about the industry overall in supporting distribution operations in it?

Speaker 3 (10:58):

Yeah, I mean, as Brad said, it's a difficult environment to be in. I mean the tires, and they are, I don't care how many lights you put in the building, paint the walls, put skylights in the tires, absorb a lot of that light. So there's always a feeling of a little bit of darkness in there. When you walk in, there's a little bit of tire haze in the air, the smell right, permeates your clothes. Whenever I visit a tire DC when I go home, my wife's like, oh, you've been to the tire DC today. Right? You don't even notice it anymore, but it gets in your clothes. So finding workers to work in that environment is difficult sometimes. And tires are heavy. They leave black marks sometimes on your clothes and your hands as you're handling them. So when you think about as a warehouseman and you have a choice on what warehouse you're going to work in, tires may not be your first choice.

(12:02):

So we try to do a lot of education and in the hiring phase, showing them videos, taking 'em on the floor, explaining exactly what it's going to feel like, be like you're going to be touching tires and what does it smell like? And so we try to spend a lot of time from an educational standpoint with our employees prior to getting them on the floor. We do a tire training, there's a lot more to a tire, A DOT code that's on there, and it tells when the tire was made and the tire ID and all these things, the tread codes. And so we have to do a lot of training upfront for associates before they ever kind of touch their first tire. And they have to be used to, it's a lot of heavy lifting and like I said, it's not an environment where you're handling little boxes of candy or whatever, so it takes a certain kind of individual, but we found that once they get in there, they stay. And to Brad's point, the buildings are, we try to keep 'em as clean and spotless as we can. And so despite being big black tires, again, it's a place where I think we've thrived in the business. We have a number of tire manufacturers that we work with. And so I like to think that we're kind of the king of tire logistics.

Speaker 1 (13:37):

Great. There are some very fit looking associates in those warehouses. I know there is. Yeah. I wouldn't want to have a tug of war contest with those staffs. No. So the human element is quite taxing. And I know you guys have started to look into some automation solutions and there's something that we've talked about called Fred Brad. I wondered if you could tell us what that is, how you started to get into it, where you think it is in terms of the evolutionary scale for automation for your operations.

Speaker 2 (14:18):

Sure. Yeah. So Fred is basically an automated guided vehicle that runs on a track and takes pallets from point A to point B. And as Bob said, labor's getting harder and harder to procure in these tire factories and distribution centers. So matter of fact, again, I was in our Joliet plant yesterday. We're putting in five more AGVs there to really, because we can't hire enough people, so it's going to allow us to take five people per shift off of the operation. And it can be costly a little bit, but what we're doing in Aiken is kind of a bare bones a GV. We expanded our Aing factory warehouse a few years ago. It's a million square. It's a little over a million square feet. And because of the geography and the topography, we had to, it's a very long building. So literally to get from the palletizers where tires come out of the factory to the back of the warehouse is almost a half a mile travel.

(15:27):

And so you can imagine we spent a lot of travel time, a lot of manpower, just trucking tires into the warehouse from the palletizer. So we're putting in these AGVs nicknamed Fred and Bob will have to tell you why they nicknamed 'em Fred, but to basically do that, so they will make a loop from the palletizers coming out of the factory. They'll bring a pallet in the back of the warehouse to a drop zone, drop it off, and then we'll have somebody back there, put it away, and then they'll pick up potentially empty pallets and bring back up to the factory. So that's what we're doing at Aiken, and that's very similar what we're doing in Joliet Canada as well.

Speaker 1 (16:06):

Okay. So Bob, why Fred?

Speaker 3 (16:08):

As far as the name Fred that came from the manufacturer, we kind of joked about that when that first came out, but that's their terminology. And so we continue to use Fred now in multiple tire locations. It's been a good move for us. We've also started looking at humanoids and doing some loading and unloading of the trailers with humanoids. So a lot of work being done there on our team with that. And we hope to maybe have a working pilot sometime in early 25. We've talked to Brad about trying to get that into one of his sites and see if we can get that humanoid to move some tires for us. So a lot of exciting stuff going on

Speaker 2 (16:57):

That would be a game changer because again, think about how labor intensive it is to unload 1100 tires that are stacked in the truck and load 'em on a pallet and then load those tires back into another trailer and do that all day. And that would be a game changer, Bob. So keep pushing that one.

Speaker 1 (17:17):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (17:19):

We're going to keep going until we get it right.

Speaker 1 (17:22):

I want to wrap up. You both have had good careers in supply chain and we could spend a whole episode kind of detailing all of the ins and outs of what you've done over the years you've been in the workforce. But I wondered if you might share with us something that has most surprised you, whether it's in the current tire sort of environment or in your CPG past or just in general, something that maybe you hadn't expected would happen or you'd see over the course of your career when you started it. And either you can go first and if you need a minute to think, please take it,

Speaker 3 (18:00):

Brad, I'll let you go first.

Speaker 2 (18:02):

Well, thanks. For me, it's the push. This isn't anything new, but the push towards sustainability, right? Years ago, even 10 years ago, we weren't really talking in that serious about taking carbon emissions out of the supply chain, particularly in logistics, right? Scope three, scope three emissions is a big deal,

Speaker 1 (18:27):

Right? Yeah. It's a big issue for the industry and we've spent some time on other podcasts discussing it, and I think we all collectively have a long way to go to deliver the goals that we've set forth. Bob, what's been a surprise for you?

Speaker 3 (18:44):

Well, I just piggybacking off of Brad's comments there, just the whole carbon reduction and how does that factor into our operations and tying it back to ache. And we're looking at putting a couple of electric yard trucks on site there. And so this is not something, I mean, we started working with a couple, two different companies. I think back, it's only been seven, eight years ago, and I think last year we purchased what, 40 electric, 47 or something, electric yard trucks. We've got two scheduled for the Aiken Bridgestone facility. This would replace the diesel truck, the two diesel trucks that are on site. And so we're working through that right now, but that's not something when I started, no one was even thinking about electric yard trucks and what that would look like. And that was even something that we would ever do. And we took that first diesel yard truck that we had.

(19:54):

We took it to I think orange. They took the diesel engine out of it, they put electric motors in it. We created the first electric yard truck here eight years ago or something, and now they're all over the place and we're buying them in groves and putting them out there in the market. Again, we're putting this together for Aiken, and it's just not something that I ever expected to see 35 years ago where electric vehicles, much less moving trailers around a yard. The drivers really operating them, and which is something we weren't sure how they would react as well. So the acceptance of these electric vehicles is a big thing for us too.

Speaker 2 (20:47):

A couple other things too, I'll add to that is around automation is autonomous trucks. There's been a lot of talk, and I've always been sort of a skeptic, right on. I don't think in my lifetime I'm ever going to see 72,000 pound class eight vehicles running down the highway with no driver in it. But I got to be honest with you, we're testing from Aiken to Dallas, an autonomous lane. We're shipping one week to now, we still have a driver because we're just starting. There's still a driver sitting in the cockpit, but things like that.

Speaker 1 (21:26):

Right. Well, lots of interesting reflections and the space will be really interesting to watch as we see it unfold over the coming years. So thanks both to both of you. It's been really great to hear about the logistics of tires in the first place, and then your perspective on your careers and how you've seen the industry change in support of that. So look forward to a good summer, both of you, and hope to see you both soon.

Speaker 2 (21:58):

Alright, thanks Will. Thanks a lot. Thanks Bob. See you. Thanks, Brad.

Speaker 1 (22:03):

Take care. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to rate us and subscribe to us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. You can also re-listen to our entire library of episodes on our website, dhl.com/abn b podcast. See you next time.