Cooper Claims $10M Annual Savings From Plant Automation

The adoption of automated sort-and-palletise systems and all three of Cooper Tire’s US factories is saving an estimated US$10 million a year, the company reports. Installation of the first of such systems, which use towering gantry cranes and conveyors to sort and stack tyres by bar code, began in Findlay in May 2007 and the final system in Texarkana was signed off in February 2009.

The Findlay automation system has reduced the number of manual tyre lifting touches from five to zero, and pallets of tyres previously handled three times by a forklift are now handled just once. “It’s an ergonomic improvement by having the tyres handled automatically versus people lifting them by hand,” points out Findlay plant engineer Scott Forry. The installation of the system is, comments Forry, “the largest single automation change that the Findlay plant has undertaken.”