Apollo Tyres Gains 9% Productivity with IoT Solution from Deloitte and AWS

A leading global tire company with seven standalone manufacturing plants in Asia and Europe, Apollo Tyres has grown rapidly in the past few decades. Faced with limited insight into the performance of its costly equipment, the company sought an IoT solution to digitalize and standardize its manufacturing processes. Machine data held the key to process efficiency.

Tire manufacturing involves numerous steps and a variety of heavy equipment. Apollo’s machines were equipped with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, which collect data on production capacity and other metrics. But this data was siloed, offering a window into the performance of individual machines only, with no basis for comparison between machines or plants.

This limited visibility was particularly concerning in the case of Apollo’s tire rubber mixers. These machines are crucial to the manufacturing process. They are also extremely capital intensive—representing an investment of about $24 million each, including related infrastructure—labor intensive, and energy intensive. Any improvement to their performance promised significant returns.

AWS Partner Deloitte was working with AWS on other projects when the opportunity to test new technologies in the tire industry arose. Seeing an ideal fit between Deloitte and Apollo, AWS prompted a collaboration.

Deloitte leveraged its expertise in building secure, scalable IoT solutions to develop the solution architecture with AWS using various AWS services. These included AWS IoT SiteWise, a managed service for collecting and analyzing data from industrial equipment, running on AWS IoT Greengrass, a cloud service for building, deploying, and managing device software at the edge. This enabled ingestion of a very large volume of raw data packet streams from Apollo’s equipment into an AWS data lake.

The complete solution consists of a smart manufacturing platform with a centralized dashboard. To test the proof of concept, Apollo started with its mixers, feeding data from the mixers into the AWS data lake. Amazon Redshift enabled data visualization on the dashboard, presenting a detailed, near real-time view of equipment metrics for faster, more informed decision making by plant personnel.

The newfound connectivity finally enabled Apollo to compare data. “That was the beauty of it,” said Shibu George, global head advanced manufacturing at Apollo Tyres. “When we started streaming data to AWS, we could compare the performance within the plant, and across plants. That was a unique opportunity.”

With seamless access to mixer data, Apollo could identify performance discrepancies and take corrective actions. The company proceeded with deeper analytics and improved productivity by 9 percent—equivalent to the capacity of more than one mixer. This makes it possible to increase production without investing $24 million in another mixer and related infrastructure.

Apollo’s teams initially expressed some unease about the visibility of their data; however, management was able to alleviate this by showing them the benefits. “With the help of Deloitte, we could shine a light and show our teams how the data could help them improve. It was a great experience,” said George. This, along with training and support from AWS, helped Apollo make the cultural shift into a data-driven organization.

The boost in productivity from Apollo’s mixers also reduced its energy usage by 3 percent. Viewed in isolation, this reduction might seem negligible. However, a single mixer has a massive energy load of about 10 megawatts—enough power to illuminate a town of about 200,000 people. Reducing CO2 emissions in this energy load by a mere 3 percent is equivalent to cutting emissions from 4,000 vehicles traveling for an entire year.

Apollo then explored doing more with its data using artificial intelligence and machine learning, such as predicting compound properties and testing process improvements. The company also started streaming data from other equipment, including its curing presses and tire building machines, ultimately realizing a 50% reduction in idle time on curing presses. Numerous other projects are in the works, and the company sees virtually limitless potential. Armed with advanced analytics, and the ongoing support of Deloitte and AWS, Apollo is confident in its ability to continue unlocking value from its machine data. The engagement was eye-opening, and in the words of George, “We saw the power of taking our data to the cloud.”