Design transformation on AWS for the world’s largest tire manufacturer
The client, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is the world’s largest manufacturer of tires and other rubber products, including industrial materials and sporting goods. They aimed to streamline their processes to achieve better design quality and performance.
Business Requirements
The client aimed to improve their tire design and manufacturing processes to achieve better collaboration, data integration, application consolidation and performance. Their on-premises product design solution faced challenges with scalability, agility, security and the availability of high-end graphics for CAD and PLM. They also sought to enhance application resiliency for disaster recovery and cybersecurity incidents.
The Solution
The client teamed up with HCLTech, using AWS for cloud services. HCLTech utilized xLMCloud to migrate and modernize product engineering and design.
- Migration and modernization of tire design applications:
- Migration of PTC Creo CAD application on AWS AppStream to remote design development and collaboration
- PTC Windchill PDM migration to AWS EC2, RDS and S3 for agility, scalability and resilience
- Greenfield PLM implementation on DS 3DX as the strategic tire design platform
- Consolidation of custom applications to DS 3DX for better collaboration and data exchange
- Migration of CAE simulation and the modernization of job submission processes utilizing AWS ParallelCluster to enhance scalability, agility and performance.
- Rearchitecting bespoke tire design applications to cloud-native and deployment within a containerized environment
- Solution steps involved:
- Workshops for detailed assessment of business processes including Project & Portfolio Management, Tire Design, Material Engg, Manufacturing, Quality and Testing
- Assessment of applications, integrations and infrastructure
- Evaluation and business case for hosting options including ISV SaaS and AWS hosting
- Recommendation of the target deployment architecture on AWS cloud, along with strategies for data migration and application upgrades
- Provisioning the required infrastructure using infrastructure automation
- Data migration using AWS DataSync
- Migration of databases and file vaults to AWS PaaS services
- Rehosting and upgrading PLM applications on AWS
- Centralized monitoring and active alert mechanisms for cloud health services and resources
- Implementing high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR)
- Performance tuning and testing
- Continuous improvements with monitoring, rightsizing, reporting and governance
- Data analytics and visualization to track usage
The Impact
- Enhanced speed: An integrated tire design platform streamlines data exchange, speeds up the design process and promotes innovative, high-quality tire products
- Reduced cost: Application modernization and consolidation significantly reduced maintenance cost allowing allocation of resources to strategic initiatives rather than routine maintenance
- Reduced risk: Standardizing business processes on a single PLM platform reduced risks, improved productivity and eased transitions for new team members
- Increased resilience: The platform's availability and resilience have been significantly enhanced by utilizing AWS PaaS services for database and computing. This approach ensures continuous business operations and reduces the risk of disruptions during disasters and cybersecurity incidents
- Enhanced performance: The application performance has enhanced by 20% following the migration and post-platform upgrade, while the costs associated with infrastructure hosting have decreased by 25%
- Faster deployment: Infrastructure provisioning and application deployment have been accelerated from days to hours using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and DevOps automation
- Enhanced security: Data security of design information has been enhanced by hosting CAD applications on VDIs for contractors and implementing security best practices for data at rest and in transit
Future Roadmap
The transformation of the client’s tire design application is ongoing. Below is the roadmap for the coming months:
- Consolidation of selected tire design applications to the DS 3DX PLM platform on AWS
- Rearchitecting custom tire design apps for cloud-native architecture with containerized deployment on AWS
- Taking these best practices to other client tire brands and other geographical regions
- Explore opportunities for AI led product engineering transformation and conduct POCs in areas of requirement management, quality management, change management, manufacturing engineering.
AWS Services Used:
Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon FSx, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Backup, Amazon VPC, ELB, AWS IAM, AWS KMS, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Glue, Amazon QuickSight, AWS Data Sync, AWS AppStream 2.0
