Apollo logs into AWS cloud to make tyre manufacturing smarter

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that Apollo Tyres is moving the company’s entire IT infrastructure to AWS cloud. The initiative aims to digitise Apollo Tyres’ manufacturing process and is part of its digital strategy to achieve $5 Billion in revenue by 2026.

The decision to go all-in on Amazon cloud will enable Apollo Tyres to use AWS’s broad portfolio of services achieve for transforming customer experience,  driving productivity, compliance, and process efficiency gains globally, across its seven factories.

“By digitally transforming with AWS, we can unlock productivity and efficiency gains in our factories globally, innovate new products and services faster, and enhance customer experience,” said Hizmy Hassen, Chief Digital Officer, Apollo Tyres.

“We are using AWS capabilities, like the internet of things (IoT) and machine learning (ML) services, to connect our factories and make them smarter. This fosters collaboration between our IT and business teams to make the production process more efficient while delivering higher quality products at lower cost,” he said.

Apollo Tyres will draw on the breadth and depth of AWS capabilities, including IoT, data and analytics, and machine learning, to transform into an agile, data-driven enterprise.

Using data from the factory floor and real-time information from production machines, like tyre rubber mixer machines, the tyre major can expand operational intelligence capabilities and more accurately manage machine utilisation, ensuring high-quality levels and machine efficiency.

Sharing details of the initiative, an AWS press release noted that Apollo Tyres will be connecting all its factories in the cloud this year in India and Europe.

“By 2022, Apollo Tyres plans to migrate all mission-critical enterprise applications, including its SAP applications, to AWS to enhance customer experience, improve process efficiency, and enable process automation” it added.

Apollo Tyres produces more than 2,425 tons (2,200 metric tons) of tyres daily in its seven factories worldwide. Since each factory previously ran its on-premises infrastructure in silos, which provided limited visibility into global manufacturing efficiencies, there was a need to upgrade its infrastructure to develop new ways of engaging with fleet operators, tyre dealers, and consumers, while delivering tyres and services efficiently at competitive prices.

Taking the first step, the company created a data lake on AWS, which centrally stores Apollo Tyres’ structured and unstructured data at scale. “This data lake provides the foundation for an integrated data platform, which enables its engineers around the world to collaborate in developing cloud-native applications and improve enterprise-wide decision making.”

The integrated data platform enables Apollo Tyres to innovate new products and services, including energy-efficient tires and remote warranty fulfillment.

“Apollo Tyres is using the cloud to digitally transform, improve the tyre manufacturing process, and deliver better value to customers,” said Vaishali Kasture, Head of Enterprise, Mid-Market, and Global Businesses, AWS India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL).

 “By moving its entire infrastructure to AWS, Apollo Tyres creates an environment of rapid and continuous innovation to provide safer and better quality tyres, and enhanced customer service experiences,” she added.

Using AWS IoT SiteWise, a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organise, and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale, and AWS IoT Greengrass, an open-source edge runtime and cloud service for building, deploying, and managing device software, Apollo Tyres developed a IoT-in-a-box solution.

The solution connects production machines on the factory floor to AWS in as few as five days. Once connected, the solution captures data from multiple machines—including mixers, tyre building equipment, and curing presses – and feeds it to the data lake.

Apollo Tyres uses Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehouse, to create a global dashboard for visualising production information from the data lake, providing business teams and plant managers with real-time visibility into the manufacturing process.

This visibility improves production efficiency and productivity, for example by reducing the idle time of curing presses that shape the tyre in a mould by 50%.

Apollo Tyres also launched an automated tyre inspection program that checks for tyre defects using photos of the tyres taken as they progress along the production line.

Based on Amazon Rekognition, a machine learning service that automates image and video analysis, this automation allows factory supervisors to intervene when manufacturing anomalies occur, providing customers with high-quality tyres that meet strict safety standards.

Using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives AWS customers the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications in AWS or on-premises, the company is building new digital products. This uses microservices that support any application architecture, regardless of scale, load, or complexity.

The manufacturer is also building a suite of applications to help commercial vehicle fleet operators track the status of their vehicles’ tyres, prompting them to replace a tyre before it fails, to ensure road safety and minimise vehicle downtime.