Apollo Tyres Join Hands With Amazon Web Services To Make Factories Smarter

The tyre brand will fully capitalize on AWS (Amazon Web Services) technologies, including Machine Learning, Internet of Things and Data Analytics.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing platform of multinational technology giant Amazon said on Tuesday that Apollo tyres will be using its platform for digitalizing manufacturing processes and transforming customer services. This means the Indian tyre maker will move its entire IT infrastructure to AWS and utilize its services to revolutionize customer experience, while simultaneously boosting productivity, compliance and process efficiency improvements across its seven facilities located around the world.  

The tyre brand will make the most out of AWS technological capabilities, including Machine Learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT) and Data Analytics to transform itself into a quick, data-driven venture. The company will be creating a kind of ecosystem where data is retrieved from the factory floor and combined with real-time information taken from production machines such as tyre rubber mixer machines, to expand the potential of operational intelligence and more precisely, manage the utilization of machines, ensuring the highest level of efficiency.   

Data and application migration in India and Europe

Apollo Tyres will be connecting all of its manufacturing plants to the AWS cloud this year in India and Europe. And by 2022, the tyre maker is mulling to migrate all the mission-critical enterprise applications to AWS, including SAP (Systems Applications and Products) applications, and improve customer experience and facilitate process automation. 

Chief Digital Officer, Apollo Tyres, Hizmy Hassan said that through this digital transformation, the tyre maker can unlock the potential of improvements in productivity and efficiency in its facilities across the world, and modernize products and services rapidly. 

He further added that using IoT and Machine Learning technologies of AWS, the tyre brand will connect its manufacturing plants and make them smarter, encouraging collaboration between IT and business teams to create efficiency in the production process, and deliver high-quality products at a reasonable cost. 

The company presently manufactures over 2,425 tonnes of tyres daily across its seven plants worldwide, and each unit has been running its on-premises set-up in silos, which offered limited attention to global manufacturing efficiencies. So, in order to develop newer ways of engaging with tyre dealers, consumers and fleet operators while delivering tyres and services at competitive prices, the company needed to upgrade its infrastructure. 

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And in this process, the primary step from the tyre brand was to create a data lake on Amazon Web Services, which keeps all the structured and unstructured data of the company at a large scale. This helps the business teams and the plant managers to visualize production information in real-time.

Automation and improving efficiency for delivering world-class products

The same data lake provides the groundwork for an integrated data platform, enabling Apollo Tyres’ engineers around the globe to easily collaborate in developing cloud-native applications and improving the decision making across the company. 

The data platform also allows the company to create innovative products and services such as energy-efficient tyres and remote warranty fulfilment. For instance, Apollo Tyres has launched an automated tyre inspection programme that automatically checks for tyre defects by using tyre photos taken during the production line. The technology is based on Amazon’s machine learning service known as Rekognition, which automates and analyses images and videos and let the supervisor know of any manufacturing anomalies, eventually bringing a high-quality end product that goes in line with global safety standards. 

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Similarly, with the help of technologies such as IoT SiteWise, IoT Greengrass, IoT-in-a-box and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Apollo Tyres will digitally transform the tyre manufacturing process and create an environment of continuous innovation to offer safer and better-quality tyres, and enhanced customer service.

Source: PTI