In today’s manufacturing landscape, businesses face a trifecta of challenges: persistent labor shortages, rising costs due to inflation, and the growing uncertainty of global trade. For Sears Seating, a company with over 160 years of manufacturing innovation, the answer to these challenges was clear - invest intelligently and get quick and scalable results from automation.
That’s exactly what they did.
In a recent Vention-hosted webinar, Roberto Tovar, Advanced Manufacturing Engineering Manager at Sears Seating, shared how his team launched flexible automation in a new facility—cutting costs by up to 50%, eliminating integration delays, and empowering engineers to take ownership of the entire process.
Here’s a closer look at the strategies, lessons, and real-world advice he offered to help other manufacturers do the same.
A Blank Canvas for Factory Automation
When Sears Seating was tasked with expanding operations into a brand-new facility, the team saw more than just an empty factory floor—they saw an opportunity.
“We had the chance to start fresh,” said Tovar. “No legacy equipment, no legacy layout. The question became: how do we make every square foot count?”
Instead of relying on traditional turnkey automation vendors, Sears Seating partnered with Vention to co-develop flexible, semi-automated production lines. The goal was to ensure that new solutions aligned with the available real estate and generated profit immediately, instead of making big bets on moonshots with long payback periods.
The “blank canvas” approach allowed for a flexible strategy where they could start with straight lines and conveyors, then incrementally expand their automation station by station, based on real needs. Approaching automation in this modular, plug-and-play way also enforced a continuous improvement, learning from each installation.
From DIY Fixes to Scalable Solutions
Like many manufacturers, Sears Seating had a long history of creating homegrown solutions for operational challenges—often with unreliable pathways to automation. Their internal attempts often lacked safety features, scalability, and efficiency. Additionally, it made troubleshooting and future-proofing of the solution more difficult with lack of in-house skills for complex customized designs.
“Internally, we’d build things fast but they were not always safe or scalable,” Tovar said. “One example was a manual fixture for deflating seat cushions during foam forming. It worked, but it wasn’t safe or standardized.”
Partnering with Vention changed that. The Sears Seating team was able to redesign their key process with better safety, more modularity, and quicker deployment. Cost efficiency was an added benefit. The whole project was 50% more cost-effective compared to doing it inhouse and way faster—ready in 15 days instead of a month that was quoted by other integrators.
Empowering Engineers Through Upskilling
Beyond the productivity gains, Sears Seating also gained a major benefit that often goes overlooked: upskilling their team and adding value to the role of a Manufacturing Engineer.
“Vention’s control systems are intuitive enough that our engineers can now develop control skills and move towards Python programming” Tovar explained. “With traditional integrators, if you don’t have a dedicated control engineer who understands how the control works, there is going to be a lot of downtime, or is going to cost a lot of money.”
This capability helped shift Sears’ engineering team from a traditional support role into advanced manufacturing—closing the gap between design and implementation.
Scaling Up Automation Faster
With the success of their proven approach to automation, Sears Seating is already working on designs for their next line, applying everything they’ve learned. The biggest problem that Vention solved for Sears Seating was having to reverse engineer the design - which often involved trying to trace designs saved in personal folders, or start from scratch to get measurements. With Vention’s digital MachineBuilder platform all the crucial assets are easily available, making it easy to iterate quickly and “copy and paste”automation across their business.
As the company grows, Tovar sees Vention as a long-term partner, not just a supplier.
“We’re creating a library of great designs. Make it once—safe, ergonomic, efficient—and then we can replicate it wherever we need.”
How to Plan Your Automation Journey
For many manufacturers, starting their automation journey is the biggest step, and Tovar has great insights to share to help others in the initial phase of automation. The most important advice from him? “Start small and solve real problems! Don’t chase big automation dreams right away. Look at safety, ergonomics, and quality. When you fix those, efficiency and throughput follow.”
Watch the full webinar to learn more
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Choosing the right automation partners and finding the right resources is of course the most important step in your automation journey. Get started with the automation resources from Vention:
