Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Cooper Tire Lowers Operating Costs with New Mold-Tracking System That Goes the Extra Mile
Overview
Country: United States of America
Industry: Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Headquartered in Findlay, Ohio, Cooper Tire & Rubber Company specializes in the manufacture and marketing of replacement tires and original equipment automotive products and has more than 20,000 employees and 52 manufacturing facilities in 13 countries.
Business Situation
Cooper Tire uses many tire molds to manufacture tires to meet customer specifications. With four tire manufacturing facilities in the United States, the company needed a way to track molds as they moved within and between its plants. It also wanted to standardize the distributed systems at each location to streamline processes and reduce operating costs.
Solution
Cooper Tire is implementing a new tracking system in its U.S. tire plants to improve the visibility of its tire molds through normal operations and peripheral processes. The system uses forms to track the movement of molds within and between facilities. To help standardize processes and share data, the company is migrating to the Microsoft® Office InfoPathTM 2003 information-gathering program.
Benefits
n Easy-to-use interface with minimal learning curve for users
n Global visibility of all tire molds
n Standardized systems for intraplant and interplant mold movement
n Fewer misplaced molds
n Time savings in handling sidewall plates
n Enhanced reporting capabilities / “Microsoft InfoPath technology helps us stay competitive by using forms to deliver consistent processes across our manufacturing plants, supporting our goal of continuous improvement in manufacturing.”
Ronald Sawyer, Manufacturing IT Manager, Cooper Tire
Cooper Tire & Rubber Company, a company with a long history of “good merchandise, fair play, and a square deal,” wanted to standardize its tire-mold-tracking operations for better communication and productivity. The company faced some inefficient processes in the tracking systems that it used for its tire molds. Cooper Tire chose a solution based on the Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 information-gathering program, which should enable the organization to enhance productivity. The solution should also lower operating costs and improve the efficiency of processes. Currently in the midst of this implementation, Cooper Tire expects to streamline the mold-tracking system by integrating InfoPath-based forms with its Oracle database environment.
Situation
Getting new tires to market quickly is a cornerstone of a successful tire-manufacturing company. “We wanted to look at all the steps involved in designing and manufacturing a new tire and attempt to shorten the overall process,” says Ronald Sawyer, Manufacturing IT Manager at Cooper Tire.
Some of the inefficiencies centered around the company’s tire molds, which move within and between Cooper Tire’s four U.S. tire-manufacturing plants as well as various mold facilities. Each plant employed different applications for tracking molds and gathered little information about the historical movement and use of a particular mold.
To compensate for the tracking inefficiencies, Cooper Tire depended on a communication chain in which people used the phone, faxes, and e-mail to direct the movement and use of molds. This process was both time intensive and dependent on human follow-through at each step.
Additionally, Cooper Tire needed a better way to track molds in transit and gain global visibility of all molds, regardless of their location or status. Each location within Cooper Tire was using its own tracking system. In effect, these distributed mold-tracking systems produced isolated pockets of information that were not accessible to employees at other facilities, schedulers being pushed to deliver “just-in-time” products, or engineers who work closely with the plants on new product lines.
The company needed a way to standardize systems so that its employees could gain a global view of its molds, including the physical location of each mold and its current use. It also needed to record historical transaction data regarding mold use and movement and to track molds in transit.
Cooper Tire’s information technology (IT) decision makers also sought to move away from the company’s mainframe environment and store mold information in an Oracle database. They wanted to find a way to make the most of this database while improving mold-tracking capabilities. Notes Sawyer, “Once we established a database system that our employees could easily access, it made sense to take advantage of this resource as we improved our mold-tracking processes.”
Solution
Cooper Tire turned to Microsoft® Certified Partner Sagestone Consulting to help it devise a new system for tracking both the interplant and intraplant movement of molds. Working with Sagestone Consulting, Cooper Tire developed forms that use Microsoft Office InfoPathTM 2003 to help the company maintain mold data.
The InfoPath information-gathering program gave Cooper Tire the means to quickly design and deploy a basic solution, along with the flexibility to add functionality at a later time. The pilot implementation of the solution, which is currently under way, consists of several forms that meet Cooper Tire’s immediate mold-tracking needs.
Initially, Cooper Tire planned to roll out the InfoPath-based solution to just a single plant.
After considering its overall objectives, however, the company decided to use XML Web services to integrate the InfoPath-based solution with its Oracle database. This enables Cooper Tire to move away from its mainframe environment and use InfoPath to populate the Oracle database. For the system to be effective, the solution will need to be deployed simultaneously to four tire plants plus the main office, where scheduling takes place.
Benefits
For Cooper Tire, having the InfoPath-based system means a coordinated effort when it comes to tracking tire molds. Having standardized processes will help the company make gains in productivity, lower its cost of operations, and improve data reliability.
Enhanced Productivity
With previous systems, Cooper Tire’s employees encountered limited information when trying to find a missing mold. Because of this, they would have to physically hunt through a number of storage locations in an attempt to locate the desired mold. Through the use of InfoPath, this search time is reduced, as Cooper Tire now has the ability to view the historical movement of a mold along with planned transactions, thus providing employees with critical information when seeking lost molds.
Using the InfoPath-based system allows Cooper Tire to reduce its time between scheduling and production by showing the configuration of current molds and stock-keeping unit (SKU) numbers. Cooper Tire’s schedulers can track exactly when a mold has reached a plant. In the past, molds were sometimes left unused because no one realized that maintenance services had been completed or that the mold had been delivered to the plant. By getting a mold quickly back into production, company productivity is maximized, resulting in more of the right tires reaching the marketplace.
Lower Cost of Operation
One of the biggest challenges for Cooper Tire was tracking molds in transit. The InfoPath-based solution gives the company the ability to closely monitor and record a mold’s progress as it moves from facility to facility. When a mold is delivered to a facility, the receiver fills out a Mold Receipt form, which is automatically entered into the system. Everyone in the shipping, receiving, and scheduling areas can check the system to see where the mold is and when it got there. Not having to hunt down misplaced molds will save the company considerable time with mold transfers. Having the right molds in the right place at the right time—and simply knowing that the molds are really there—is critical to meeting both production and planning goals.
When entry errors do occur, the new system offers employees an easy way to recover from them: the Mold Query form will provide historical data about the prior locations of a specific mold. “Planners will be able to follow the progress of specific mold parts so we can save time,” says Sawyer. “The InfoPath-based solution will provide visibility into molds in transit so we can anticipate when to schedule production. This will allow us to shorten our delivery times by entire days in some cases.”
Having a central tracking mechanism in place will enable Cooper Tire to eliminate the distributed mold-tracking systems in its various plants. These systems were not integrated and did not allow for visibility between locations. “The InfoPath-based system will be a separate module that Cooper Tire’s four plants and central office all use to keep things consistent,” explains Leian Royce, Sagestone Consulting Business Analyst. “Employees will be more productive and less frustrated now that they can quickly and easily find the molds and components they need, when they need them.”
Using InfoPath technology furthers Cooper Tire’s “just-in-time” manufacturing objective, as well as helps the company meet its objective to reduce the total time to take products to market. “Microsoft InfoPath technology helps us stay competitive by using forms to deliver consistent processes across our manufacturing plants, supporting our goal of continuous improvement in manufacturing,” states Sawyer.
Improved Performance and Reliability
The InfoPath-based solution helps Cooper Tire define a clear, standardized process for managing its molds. It also decreases the number of misplaced molds, increases the accuracy of information about the location of molds, and provides visibility for scheduling.
More important, the new system helps Cooper Tire preserve and enhance its customer relationships. “If we tell our customers that they’ll receive tires on a certain day, we need to deliver those tires on time,” says Sawyer. “We can’t afford to miss deadlines because it can cause problems for our customers. They lose business when they don’t have a full inventory.” The InfoPath information-gathering program will help Cooper Tire meet its production plans more accurately so that the company can make reliable promises to its customers.
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