CEAT partners with AWS to build smarter factories

Indian multinational tyre manufacturing company CEAT Ltd. is leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) - the cloud computing arm of Amazon.com – for cloud capabilities, including Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, business intelligence (BI), and machine learning (ML) solutions in a bid to make its factories smarter and more efficient. 

With sales in more than 100 countries worldwide, the RPG-group owned manufacturer said, it is using AWS to “drive smart manufacturing and invent intelligent tyres, like those with sensors which can predict various data points such as load and wear”.

Explaining how the company has overcome the business challenges, the tyre major said, before migrating to AWS, CEAT’s on-premises infrastructure could not scale with the demand for new digital services. As a first step to improve agility and accelerate innovation, CEAT implemented an SAP S/4HANA enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform on AWS.

Then, using Amazon QuickSight, an AWS service that helps CEAT employees understand data, CEAT set up real-time analytics dashboards using factory and enterprise data. For example, by using this service, CEAT said it was able to develop a solution that automatically recommends which tyres dealers should order based on history and real-time supply, improving customer experience.

It has helped the company develop innovative and high-quality tyres for safer journeys, including an intelligent tyre for commercial fleet operators. Intelligent tyres have built-in telemetry sensors connected to the cloud, which records tyre data, including pressure and temperature, to detect leaks and predict tyre failure. 

This minimises fleet operators’ vehicle downtime and prevents road accidents, as Ganesh Bhat, head of digital and analytics (CoE) at CEAT Ltd. noted with the use of new “cloud capabilities, like machine learning, serverless computing, and database services the company can drive smart manufacturing capabilities and create new products, like intelligent tyres, much faster”.

“In addition, we can focus on innovation instead of system maintenance by using the cloud to automate more processes,” he said.

“CEAT is making its factories smarter with AWS, bringing the best of the cloud to the tyre manufacturing process,” said Puneet Chandok, president of Commercial Business, AWS India and South Asia at AISPL, adding that CEAT can innovate rapidly with the latest cloud technology.

Meanwhile, CEAT has also used Amazon Redshift , a cloud data warehouse, to pilot a service that automatically recommends which tyres dealers should order based on history and real-time supply, further enhancing the customer experience.

Further, it is experimenting with Amazon SageMaker AWS’s service, for building, training, and deploying ML models quickly in the cloud and at the edge to predict leaks in tyre-curing presses. This can decrease tyre waste by reducing factory line stoppages and improving tyre quality, the company said.