ITR Industries represents the core manufacturing segment for tracked undercarriage components, supplying both the aftermarket and construction machinery manufacturers of many well-known brands directly.
The backbone of the ITR supply chain, alongside the Italian parts plant ITR Meccanica, is the ITR Industries facility. The manufacturing plants are located in South Korea, where chains, track shoes and sprocket segments are produced, and in China, where production focuses on track rollers, carrier rollers, tensioning idlers and drive sprockets. In this article we will focus on the Chinese manufacturing plants.
The company uses a manufacturing site covering 54,000 m2 – of which 29,000 m2 are covered halls – and also benefits from a strategic location for supplying both the headquarters in Modena, Italy, and ITR branches around the world. It is located in China's Shandong region, known for its cutting-edge manufacturing plants in the automotive and high-precision electronics industries – General Motors®, Hyundai®, Apple® and LG® are among the brands with key manufacturing plants located in this province.
Shandong is a well-consolidated and constantly expanding manufacturing environment. In recent years, numerous investments have been made throughout the region to comply with strict environmental regulations, making it a state-of-the-art hub that meets most of the latest requirements. ITR Industries has taken extensive steps to optimise the layout of its operations, improve production process management and reduce the amount of waste generated.
The foundry operation has been completely redesigned for full automation of the mould-handling process. The resulting new technologies consistently reduce emissions and move ITR Industries towards meeting the environmental challenges of the coming decades.
Managing the production of rollers, drive sprockets and idlers
Both track rollers and carrier rollers are made from forged steel – they are mechanically machined and subsequently heat-treated to achieve the required wear resistance and strength characteristics. Recently, investments have also been focused primarily on refining heat-treatment processes, which are a core part of the technologies used by ITR to ensure compliance with increasingly strict quality standards for spare parts for large machines.
Assembly and quality control
Particular attention is paid to the assembly stage, where cleanliness and repeatability are essential requirements. Before assembly, all components are individually washed and proceed along dedicated flow lines, separated by type and size. Each line is designed to optimise individual operations, and all products are 100% tested. This ensures a precise assembly process and a perfect seal. After assembly, products continue through two automated painting lines to the palletising station.
As a final step, ITR's quality standards require destructive and non-destructive testing. Among the most important are ultrasonic measurements, hardness tests, Magnaflux, IR, Charpy, and software simulations of heavy-duty working conditions applied to finished components. Using various custom-built testing machines, ITR Industries, headquartered in Shandong, is able to simulate the toughest working conditions when testing and developing new products for both the aftermarket and OEM applications.
Thanks to high productivity and efficient management of the production process, the Chinese plant serves as the ITR Group's reference centre for research and development, characterised by a strong forward-looking focus.