Goodyear: What is Digital Transformation in the Tire Industry? (CXOTalk

#DigitalTransformation #Goodyear

How does Goodyear handle digital transformation? What is Digital Transformation in the Tire Industry? Digital transformation at Goodyear involves rethinking tires as an IoT and sensor platform. “Smart tires” and connected cars are a new frontier for digital transformation strategy, customer experience, and the internet of things (IoT).

In this conversation, we discuss:
-- What is Digital Transformation?
-- Tire technology and Digital Transformation
-- The Connected Platform of Tires
-- Retraining Employees for Digital Transformation
-- Digital transformation and the culture of Innovation

Our guest is Chris Helsel is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

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Read the excerpts from the conversation on digital Transformation at Goodyear:

Michael Krigsman: What does digital transformation mean for Goodyear?

Chris Helsel: In the tires area, what the digital transformation means is, how do you bring new technologies like simulation and computer design tools into the design process for tires? We've been doing some work on this for over 25 years collaboratively with Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It's really a neat relationship that we have with them in that their core mission is the readiness of the nuclear arsenal of the U.S. government. You think about that. That's a big challenge.

You say, "So, why do they partner with a tire company?" It's exactly because we can validate those computer tools that they use day in and day out to do their job but we can do it on those thousands and thousands of products we develop every year. As I said, some of the things that tires go through, the huge amounts of deflection that you see, the impacts that we see, the traction, each one of those features in their computer codes gets validated by us with all the test data that we'd also produced that gives them confidence as they use those tools to do their job on the nuclear readiness.

It's been an awesome, collaborative relationship over 25 years. I think it's the longest-running one. These are unique to U.S. companies who can have these relationships with our national labs. That's just one example of a digital transformation in our traditional core business.

The second one has been, really, how do we start doing the work on developing artificial intelligence type-based tools to help our people make better decisions. It's that human augmentation of our engineers. There, you see that in two areas.

You already talked about the importance of materials. Materials is really one of our most important core competencies, as you'd imagine. Here, we make all kinds of material experiments year in and year out.

For decades now, we've got all this data. We've taken and trained using some machine learning type algorithms and produced some really effective tools that can give insights to our designers and material developers without having to build and test tires. Again, it's a very productive thing but also, as you might imagine, it makes us much more efficient and effective. There's an example there in our core business.

The other side, beyond tires, is really about how are we putting sensors into our tires to do basically three different missions. Mission one would be, have real-time ID of our tires, where they are and, secondly, the condition of those tires. Are they properly inflated? Are they worn out? Then the third, and really the long-term goal for sensors and tires, is to turn the tire itself almost into a sensor and how that integrates with the vehicle and vehicle developers today.