Bridgestone Group Awards
Bridgestone Group Awards 2020

In this world’s premier solar‐powered car race, young engineers from all over the world compete with their self‐designed solar cars. The solar cars travel over 3,000 kilometers in Australia over five days. Bridgestone has been supporting the event since 2013 as title sponsor to contribute to the evolution of the innovative mobility and environmental technologies, and training of the next generation of engineers. Innovations from the race have been realized and applied to electric vehicles and self-driving cars.

To meet the demand for advanced materials that support the development of more sustainable future mobility, the Company has developed new tough materials that will achieve the development of tires with higher durability and better fuel economy: Double Network, an innovative structure that balances conflicting material properties using material science technology; and SUSYM, the world’s first polymer binding rubber and resin components together to have both the flexibility of rubber and the toughness of resin on the molecular level. These two innovations have advanced toughness of the products that will contribute to create thinner and lighter tires for the realization of future of mobility and sustainable society.

BSEMIA’s new business operating model has been developed to support its customers and society at large, and make mobility smarter, safer and more accessible thanks to new business models and state-of-the-art technologies.
Specifically, Webfleet Solutions is now integrated with BSEMIA’s tire operations and service network. To support the foundation of a ‘Mobility as a Service (MaaS)’ society, BSEMIA has also pioneered other subscription platforms, such as mobox for tire related services and the electrical bike scheme mobeflex. Today, BSEMIA provides leading mobility solutions for over 50,000 fleets, operating over 1.2 million vehicles.

Teamed with suppliers, civic partners and educational leaders, the company developed two successful automotive training centers and created a program for high school students interested in pursuing careers in the automotive technology field. The program provides them with accessible education by mentoring automotive engineering and business skills, offering internships in the field and supporting students to obtain a certification prior to graduation. Over 750 students have received the training since 2015.

To support fulfilling lives of people in communities and the employees, three plants of the Company have promoted diverse projects for supporting communities affected by repeated disasters and helping solve community issues. In Kyushu region, Amagi plant supported local community by utilizing its incinerator and accepted 50 tons of waste without any charge. Kurume plant has introduced a new system that enables them to supply neighbors with 100 tons of drinking water in a time of disaster. Shimonoseki plant installed new deodorizing system with a new technology which utilizes waste heat from the co-generation system.

To effectively control odor mainly released at the mixing stage of the tire production process, the plant introduced the non-thermal plasma system as the first adopter in the Bridgestone Group, which achieved improvement in efficiency of odor control by 95 percent compared to existing deodorizer (50 percent). The new system can achieve a higher efficiency rate without using chemicals or generating any waste, and led to reduced total cost and smaller installation area for odor elimination.

The company created a product named ROBI, which consists of robotic process automation (RPA), chatbot and image recognition technologies, to achieve highly effective operations and build the foundation of new business models, products and services through digitization. 33 projects were completed to integrate to ROBI since 2018, and the company has been able to reduce 60% of human workforce for the projects and employees can now focus on value added activities such as analysis, creativity and innovation. Their motivation and efficiency increased.

To reduce the time required to test the original equipment (OE) tires for better customer satisfaction and improve market share, the company　validated and relocated tire tests conducted at Indian local labs. The testing period for the approval of OE tires was substantially reduced and contributed to reinforce confidence of local OE’s and to gain new business.