Apollo Tyres increases productivity by 9% with IoT technology

London – Apollo Tyres is seeing significant benefits as part of a new digital strategy to transform its manufacturing processes, according to a case study recently published by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As explained in an AWS report published in May, the Indian tire maker, which has seven independent manufacturing plants in Asia and Europe, had limited visibility into the performance of its equipment.

Apollo machines are equipped with SCADA systems that collect data on production efficiency and other metrics.

However, this data was isolated, offering insight only into the performance of individual machines and providing no basis for comparison between machines or installations.

This limited transparency was particularly concerning for Apollo’s tire and rubber mixing plants, which are capital-intensive — each costs about $24 million, including related infrastructure — as well as labor- and energy-intensive.

In light of this, the Indian group decided to work with AWS partner Deloitte to implement an IoT solution to connect manufacturing equipment to the data lake.

Deloitte joined the project to leverage its experience in building secure and scalable IoT solutions to architect solutions using AWS using a variety of AWS services.

These included AWS IoT SiteWise, a managed service for collecting and analyzing data from industrial devices, powered by AWS IoT Greengrass, a cloud service for building, deploying, and managing software for devices at the edge of the network.

These capabilities enabled the infusion and processing of very large volumes of raw packet data streams from Apollo devices into the AWS “data lake.”

“With Deloitte’s help, we were able to shine a light and show our teams how data can help them improve,” said Shibu George, Global Head of Advanced Manufacturing, Apollo Tyres.

According to AWS, the complete solution now includes an intelligent production platform with a central control panel.

To test the concept, Apollo started with Mixers, sending data from the Mixers to the AWS “data lake,” while Amazon Redshift enabled the data to be visualized on a dashboard, presenting “near real-time” views of hardware metrics.

“Once we started streaming data to AWS, we could compare performance within a plant and across plants. That was a unique opportunity,” George commented.

With seamless access to mixer data, Apollo was able to identify performance discrepancies and take corrective action, and with deeper analytics, they were able to increase productivity by 9%.

The improved efficiency of the Apollo mixers also reduces energy consumption by 3%, a significant saving considering that a single mixer draws about 10 megawatts of energy.

As AWS notes, reducing CO2 emissions from this energy load by just 3% is equivalent to reducing emissions from 4,000 vehicles driving for an entire year.

Apollo then explored how to better leverage the data using artificial intelligence and machine learning, for example to predict the properties of compounds and test process improvements.

The company also began streaming data from other equipment, including curing presses and tire-making machines, ultimately reducing curing press downtime by 50%.

With more projects underway, Apollo sees “virtually limitless potential in the ability to continuously extract value from machine data,” AWS concludes.