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In each issue of PTEN, we will be featuring one of our Innovation Awards winners that scored among the highest in the group. This month, we are profiling the Hunter Engineering Revolution Tire Changer with HunterNet 2 Connectivity. This product allows shops to keep a convenient count of the number of tires changed, measure shop activity and productivity, and note trends over any period of time.
PTEN sat down with Jim Hudson, project manager at Hunter Engineering, to learn more.
PTEN: What makes this product innovative?
Jim Hudson:It really is the world's first smart tire changer. No other tire changer can report its own usage to the cloud. The data it can accumulate includes things like service time, wheel size, what procedures were used, air pressure, inflation pressure, and even things like the year, make, and model. Even technician comments, things like that, can be entered in at the anytime throughout the service procedures, so when you couple all of that all that data with the power of HunterNet 2 to sort of filter that, it's a really powerful pair.
PTEN: How did this product come about?
JH: It was just kind of a natural progression as we expand the HunterNet 2 to other types of equipment. First, it was alignment machines, inspection machines, things like that, but tire changers have long been this blind spot — they just kind of always sit back there, and they do their jobs — but we're seeing there's a lot of data there that we can get.
We can kind of complete that picture of what's going on in the back shop with tire changing, balancing, inspection, and alignment, and the Revolution Tire Changer is already software driven. It has a nice big touchscreen interface, so we can enter those technician comments and things like that really easily on the machine, so it's just a real natural fit to bundle all that data and send it up.
PTEN: How does this tire changer improve the lives of technicians and shop owners?
JH: One of the biggest things is as these wheels and tires get more and more expensive, it's really important for technicians to document things like damage, scratches on the wheel, tire bulges or whatever they might encounter as they're servicing the assembly, so the HunterNet 2 connectivity gives them a super easy way to do that right on the machine, right as it's spotted (there's no need to remember it and write it down elsewhere on the repair order). It also automatically records things like billable procedures, such as force matching and bead massaging that are really important to achieving a good ride quality.
As a shop owner or manager, you're probably really interested in your equipment ROI — how it's being utilized, what its payoff is. This HunterNet 2 connectivity being expanded to the tire changer really allows a view into how that machine is being used, what its ROI is, and it gives you a really good aggregated look into tire sizes and wheel sizes that are being serviced. Depending on the shop owner’s distinct system, that might be really great insight to have. You can actually see what procedures are being used, what tire sizes or wheel sizes are being serviced; that might help drive tire stocking decisions. The HunterNet 2 screen pretty much offers that on one chart, so you can you can take a look at that at a glance and say, “Oh, maybe I need to stock more 18" tires.” So, it gives it a really interesting insight there.
