Last week, Uncountable Co-Founder Will Tashman spoke with David Shaw of Tire Industry Research about the benefits and challenges of implementing a connected materials informatics system within tire R&D organizations.
The webinar, attended by many different roles and organizations from the global tire industry, focused on defining what material informatics means for such complex material development processes as seen when making tires. The ideal informatics solution starts with raw material properties and batch history, tied to complex multi-stage compound processing, all of which is connected to compound properties and full tire performance results. With a system like this in place, there are large opportunities for accelerating material development by making scientists more efficient and reducing experimentation to reach the desired performance.
Speaking alongside Tashman and Shaw, were Eduardo Minardi and Yakov Kutsovsky, CEO of MateriaX and senior advisor to Uncountable.
Kutsovsky, formerly of Cabot Corporation, said “My experience in Cabot tells me that this is really a very high value problem, and one that people are working on every day. It has been shown over and over again that 80% of the time is spent collecting and cleaning the data and only 20% is spent on analyzing that data.” Kutsovsky continued that the Uncountable platform, and others like it, can reduce the amount of time spent hunting for data down to 10% or 20%. That boosts time available for doing real work by a factor of three or even four. “There are very few places in an organization today where you can identify up to 50% inefficiencies.” However, as with all data systems spanning across departments, the process of implementing a solution like Uncountable is not without its challenges.
“You have a change management issue on your hands,” said Tashman. “Your scientists have built up ways of working over the last few decades, and they like using their current systems and current spreadsheets. There are a lot of ingrained habits here that need to be addressed and managed over time.” Tashman followed up stating that when Uncountable works with companies, they “definitely follow a kind of crawl-walk-run mentality. You start small; you create quick wins to demonstrate the turn-around and the payback, and those wins are typically in the three month to six month range.”
For more information on the discussion and a full writeup, check out this report created by Tire Industry Research.
