History of MIRS evolution

In the traditional factories, the primary need had become that of removing the unprocessed rubber left over from the processing. It was necessary to find a system that only permitted using the quantity of rubber necessary for creating a tyre without producing waste . The inspiring concept was, therefore, the necessity to remove the idle time between one process and another.
The standard process for processing a tyre consisted of 13 phases (each one of which foresaw further intermediate phases), this process lasted for 5 days. In order to speed up the process, a 'direct connection' was necessary between the raw material (the semi-processed material) and the finished tyre to eliminate the transport and storage phases. Basically, a technology to eliminate deposits and avoid discontinuity was necessary.

Once this concept had been expounded, there was, however, a doubt; is it possible to produce a sort of "liquid" rubber? Or, is it possible to have a rubber belt that can be put on a drum without producing waste? The answer was discovered in a real revolution of procedure: in the MIRS, the rubber does not move, it remains still and is processed by robots which "orbit" around it. A radical change, if we think of the long distances that the rubber covers had to travel in the factory to move from one processing phase to another. The greatest innovation was, therefore, the idea of letting the robots move and not the rubber.

Having drawn up the basic concepts of the revolutionary method, it was then necessary to determine the most suitable technologies for starting up the process. The time had now come to seek new technologies. The secret - strangely enough - was to look for them in other "industrial contexts". Indeed, the intuition which led to the construction of the MIRS came from the motor car world. We asked ourselves, 'if robots are used in the car industry, why not do the same for tyres too?'
The first operative phase thus started. Pirelli bought eight robots from FIAT and set up a laboratory , in which the production with the new process could be tested. In 1998 , the first four tyres built with the MIRS technology were created.
From that moment, it has been all downhill; in December 1999 the MIRS project was 'announced' on the stock exchange , in the same year the first real module was constructed and in June 2000 the first MIRS factory was opened in Bicocca . Exactly two years later, in June 2002 the new compound room, the CCM (Continuous Compound Mixing) was inaugurated as an integral part of the MIRS technology. In August 2002, the number of factories in the world increased to four with the inauguration of the one in Rome, Georgia, United States.

A success story, which would never have had the same happy ending if it were not for the incredible commitment of the people who worked within the MIRS context. The figures of technicians, designers, and programmers with more integrated and composite competence than the traditional industry standards were discovered and are still being discovered inside the MIRS. It is as if the innovation, the integration, and the revolutionary synthesis represented by the MIRS process were also expressed in highly developed 'complex' professional figures who were above all capable of always thinking in a 'broad manner', like the MIRS itself.

The MIRS is an incubator of innovations, which proposes itself as a center of evolution and as Pirelli's diamond tip innovation. An always-operating motor, which pushes towards continual innovation, and as a result, generates improvements on the other existing factories.