One Year In: What Joining Sumitomo Rubber Industries Has Meant for Viaduct

A year ago, Viaduct became part of Sumitomo Rubber Industries (SRI), one of the world's largest tire manufacturers and a global leader in mobility.

At the time, the opportunity was straightforward: leverage SRI's global scale with Viaduct's industry knowledge and patented AI technology to drive both external business growth and internal SRI digital transformation. 

What we couldn't have anticipated was how quickly things have accelerated. Over the past year, Viaduct has remained a standalone company with its own leadership, team, and product roadmap while enabling SRI’s digital transformation and AI integration. 

Driving AI adoption within Sumitomo Rubber Industries

In support of SRI's strategic digital transformation initiatives, Viaduct stood up an internal efficiencies division built on its technology to deliver measurable operational improvements across SRI's plants globally.

SRI operates 20 manufacturing plants worldwide across three business lines, and Viaduct  started partnering with the tire division, which operates 11 plants and employs approximately 30,000 people worldwide.*

At Miyazaki, one of its largest tire plants, any disruption can have an immediate impact on production. But technicians had limited visibility into the health of their equipment, forcing them to troubleshoot issues one-by-one through a slow trial-and-error process and making it nearly impossible to get ahead of maintenance issues and prevent downtime.

With Viaduct, the Miyazaki plant now has real-time equipment visibility and AI-powered guidance for equipment repairs. In just the first 3.5 months, over 3,200 technicians have used the repair guidance app, driving significant gains in productivity and decreasing unplanned downtime. According to one user, "Analysis that used to take hours every month now happens automatically in seconds. I finally have time to focus on fixing problems instead of spending all of my time preparing data."

The results from this implementation will serve as the blueprint for scaling Viaduct across SRI's tire plants globally.

One comprehensive platform, many outcomes

The Viaduct Intelligence Platform brings together data, AI, and automation to transform the way manufacturers and fleet operators work and run their business. The past year marks an important evolution of the Viaduct Intelligence Platform. We continue to expand our platform capabilities, incorporating learnings and feedback from our customers on where they can drive the most value in their organization. 

One customer shared, "since partnering with Viaduct, we've seen a real shift in how the team operates day to day. Viaduct's platform tells us where to focus our attention, and tasks that used to take hours or days now take less than five minutes. By integrating Viaduct into our operations, we have real-time visibility to better manage our business day-to-day."

As the platform scales, our AI models continue to improve, consistently outperforming what customers can build in-house. By leveraging Viaduct's models, users no longer need to dedicate time and resources to building and maintaining their own models.

You can learn more about the latest capabilities and features in this press release.

What's next

The next year is about extending what we've already delivered. As a customer-centric organization, we're committed to helping more customers advance their digital transformation and AI strategies, moving them along the continuum from reactive, to proactive, and eventually predictive.

As we scale the Viaduct Intelligence Platform, we'll co-develop solutions with our customer and partner ecosystem to address more use cases across the manufacturing lifecycle. We're taking what we've learned in discrete manufacturing and applying it more broadly — across process and bulk manufacturing — to help those organizations create a unified data foundation, gain greater visibility into their operations, and act on faster, more actionable intelligence.

We can't wait to see what's next, and we look forward to having you on the journey with us.

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*SRI numbers are current as of December 31, 2025

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