Apollo Tyres harnessing IoT solution to lift productivity & save energy

Faced with limited insight into the performance of its tyre manufacturing equipment, Apollo Tyres recently sought an Internet of Things (IoT) solution that would digitalise and standardise its manufacturing processes. It approached Deloitte, who worked with the tyre maker to implement such a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS), connecting production equipment to a data lake. The result was a nine per cent increase in productivity on primary equipment and three percent reduction in energy usage.

Tyre manufacturing machinery in use within Apollo Tyres’ plants was equipped with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, which collect data on production capacity and other metrics. But this data was siloed and only offered a window into the performance of individual machines, with no basis for comparison between machines or plants.

This limited visibility, notes AWS, was “particularly concerning” in the case of Apollo’s rubber compound mixers. These essential machines are extremely capital intensive, with each unit representing an investment of approximately US$24 million, including related infrastructure, as well as labour and energy intensive. Any improvement to their performance thus “promised significant returns.”

“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,” says Shibu George, Global Head Advanced Manufacturing, Apollo Tyres

Bringing connectivity & visibility to manufacturing processes

Deloitte was working with AWS on other projects when this opportunity to test new technologies in the tyre industry arose. Seeing an ideal fit between Deloitte and Apollo Tyres, 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 analysing 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 centralised 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 visualisation 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 enables Apollo Tyres to compare data. “That was the beauty of it,” says George. “When we started streaming data to AWS, we could compare the performance within the plant, and across plants. That was a unique opportunity.”

Productivity up 9%

With seamless access to mixer data, Apollo Tyres could identify performance discrepancies and take action to correct these. The company proceeded with deeper analytics and improved productivity by nine per cent – equivalent to the capacity of more than one mixer. This enabled the tyre maker to increase production without investing in another mixer and related infrastructure.

AWS shares that Apollo Tyres’ teams “initially expressed some unease” about the visibility of their data; however, company management was able to alleviate any concerns 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,” says George. Together with training and support from AWS, this helped the tyre maker make the cultural shift into a data-driven organisation.

Improved sustainability

The boost in productivity from Apollo’s mixers also reduced its energy usage by three per cent. Viewed in isolation, this reduction might seem negligible. However, a single mixer has an 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 three per cent is equivalent to cutting emissions from 4,000 vehicles traveling for an entire year.

Virtually limitless potential

Apollo Tyres 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 tyre building machines, ultimately realising a 50 per cent reduction in idle time on curing presses.

AWS reports that “numerous other projects are in the works,” with Apollo Tyres seeing “virtually limitless potential.” It concludes that armed with advanced analytics, and the ongoing support of Deloitte and AWS, Apollo Tyres is “confident in its ability to continue unlocking value from its machine data.” As Shibu George puts it, “we saw the power of taking our data to the cloud.”