Ceat’s Journey to Lighthouse

CEAT becomes the first tyre company globally to receive the World Economic Forum’s Lighthouse Designation

In January 2023, RPG Group’s flagship tyre company, CEAT, achieved a new milestone in its digital transformation journey. The company’s Halol factory was designated as a Global Lighthouse Network by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and McKinsey, making it the first tyre factory globally and the only automotive company in India to be recognised as a Lighthouse factory.

With this, CEAT joins an elite list of 132 global sites and factories that have been recognised worldwide as frontrunners of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

WHAT ARE LIGHTHOUSES?

Amidst major disruptions in energy, supply chain, talent, and the growing impact of climate change, Lighthouses are those pioneers and leaders who have embraced innovation, sustainability and a vision to scale advanced technologies, throughout their production networks and beyond.

Since 2018, Lighthouses recognised by WEF and McKinsey demonstrate the ability to drive impact at scale in all geographies and sectors. The network spans companies from across industries such as consumer-packaged goods, process industries and advanced industries, to pharmaceutical and medical products.

Industry 4.0 at CEAT

In 2012, CEAT embarked on its digital transformation journey with the aim to improve productivity and increase energy efficiency. Anant Goenka, Vice Chairman, CEAT, shares, “The digital journey for CEAT Halol started with the introduction of bar codes in PCR tyres and the MES platform on the shop floor. Over the next 5-6 years, we continued to work towards digital projects that were mostly centered around individual use cases or in the pilot phase, with no scale-up use cases. However, since 2019, the company has truly worked towards accelerated development and deployment, which has been the starting point of our journey towards 4IR development.”

As the first step, the company began by mapping and ensuring 100% digitalisation of operator touch points. Jayasankar Kuruppal, SVP, Manufacturing, CEAT, adds, “Digitalised operator touch points ensure greater people participation, and we were able to conduct Hackathons on the shop floor with CFTs, discussing their present problems and prospective digital solutions. These touch points helped solve day-to-day problems.”

Among the biggest catalysts of the accelerated Industry 4.0 journey at CEAT was the company’s strategic decision to grow its footprint in the export market, especially across Europe. The European market has stringent process specification requirements, including a preference for greener material.

As a result, to cater to this growing market, CEAT shifted its focus from a carbon base to a silica base, which would enable better rolling resistance and better wet grip in its products, which are key specifications mandated in Europe.

Over the past five years alone, the proportion of green materials used by CEAT in its production process more than doubled, from 28% to 57%. However, this has had an adverse impact on the overall cycle time and efficiency of the equipment, bringing down the overall capacity of the plant, its productivity levels and increase in scrap generation.

Building efficient systems through Industry 4.O

To address this problem area and help improve productivity, the company deployed several conventional solutions, to no avail. However, an effective solution was eventually found in 4IR.

As a result, CEAT was able to develop more than 30 use cases, touching every aspect of the production process, right from material procurement, manufacturing and warehousing to training and customer delight.

• 1. CEAT deployed 4IR technologies such as advanced analytics for dynamic process control, VR for operator training, visual analytics, digitisation initiatives such as large-scale IIoT, real-time visualisation and alerts, and closed looping.
  • i    The implementation of 4IR use cases led to reduction in cycle times by 20%, lowering process scrap by 46%, and cutting down energy consumption by 15%. Overall, this intervention resulted in a ~2,5x increase in export and OEM sales in two years.
  • ii  Digital has made life easier for those at the shop floor, in the following areas:
    • a)   200+ log-books/manual touch points across the shop floor have been eliminated.
    • b)   The real-time quality dashboard has reduced overall TAKT time for major defect analysis from 3 days to 1 hour.
    • c)   Leakages of steam and air are now predicted through the digital model, against quarterly audits done through manual interventions in the past.
• 2. Digital solutions in energy efficiency improvement projects have helped CEAT improve the overall carbon footprint of the plant. At normalised tonnage levels, GHG emission levels at Halol have reduced by more than 20% over the last two years, while water consumption has been brought down by over 30%.
• 3. The company has moved towards a paperless shop floor at Halol by digitising its process log books and check sheets, thereby eliminating nearly 75 types of physical log books.
• 4. Currently, CEAT is working towards implementing a Digital Nerve Centre that will help optimise its entire supply chain network.
• 5. The company is also working towards its sustainability vision of reducing carbon footprint by 50%, by 2030.

Arnab Banerjee, MD & CEO, CEAT says, “The digital solutions have helped us to adopt greener raw material, which is key to cracking the export and OEM markets. The challenge here was to conform and adapt to greener markets and more stringent process specifications, without losing the plant capacity and also ensuring lower levels of rework/scrap generation. As a result of our efforts, the product and plant perception have improved in the eyes of our customers and OEMs.

In terms of energy conservation we had already achieved efficiency levels that were among the best, with all the conventional ideas implemented. We knew that if we were to get better results from figures that were already good we needed to challenge some of our traditional ways of working, and only then we could deliver further improvements. The dynamic warmup system in the tyre curing press, and the compressed air optimisation using predictive analytics, are great examples of this new approach.”

On the manpower front, CEAT explored digital platforms that could help train its people faster and more efficiently, and set up a Virtual Reality (VR) station for machine operators. The VR platform ensures that people on the shop floor are trained faster, in a safer manner, and are able to deliver quality products from their first day of operating a new machine.

Driving company-wide adoption of 4th industrial technologies

During the transformation exercise, CEAT focused on four key aspects relating to the implementation:

• Impact: Technology adoption should be in line with customer and business needs. It should be aligned with the business needs so that they have a clear impact on the topline and bottom line.
• Integrated use case: 4IR use cases should be distributed across the shop floor with an end-to-end implementation approach, so that adoption happens across the value chain. It should not be treated as a niche exercise that is restricted to a few people.
• Enabler/workforce engagement: People capability and transformation are the key enablers in this journey. Investments in people capability building, and the formation of a digital COE to have a more focused approach towards implementation, have been instrumental to the success of this exercise. At the peak of its implementation, CEAT had more than 10 ‘agile teams’ working across various projects.
• Technology platform: The company undertook a holistic upgradation of the technology stack, from L1 to L5 levels, and introduced edge and cloud computing.

The next chapter in the Lighthouse journey

In next phase of implementation, CEAT intends to invite its network of contract manufacturers to the plant site, and upskill them to scale up their digital journey. Jayasankar adds, “We plan to conduct ‘Show and Tell’ sessions for our partners and other companies within the Group, to help them adopt 4IR technologies. The aim is to take digital beyond the four walls of the factory to our vendors/suppliers and to our supply chain partners to increase visibility and thus, resilience.”

Anant says, “The whole process of Lighthouse designation has brought in a lot of excitement within the organisation. At Halol, over 85% of people today are digitally savvy and use some or the other form of digital tools to execute their daily work. For example, the Daily Work Management (DWM) meeting at Halol has moved from conventional paper-based discussions to discussions based on digital platforms.

Today, CEAT is recognised as a frontrunner in digital transformation, in the global manufacturing community. This provides us with exposure to multiple communities of the WEF, which will further open up opportunities to strengthen our leadership position in terms of digital capabilities and future readiness.”

Through this exciting journey, CEAT has deployed a few industry-first solutions challenging conventional systems and working with a zero based approach towards problem solving. The use case of IoT-enabled intelligent controls for energy improvement, is one such case where 4IR technology has been used to bring down non-productive time in the curing process.

This, however, is just the beginning for CEAT. The company has already identified key digital deployment needs at its Chennai and Nagpur plants, which will take it further ahead it in its journey of Lighthouse and overall excellence.