Sears Seating Reduces OpEx by 20% with Manufacturing Automation Platform

Sears Seating is a leading manufacturer of suspension seating systems for the agriculture, construction, and material handling industries.

With a 170-year legacy of engineering excellence, the company sought to invest in intelligent automation to address challenges such as labor shortages and rising operational costs. The expansion to a new facility offered the perfect opportunity to build efficiency from the ground up—without the constraints of legacy systems or equipment.

With this clean slate, Sears Seating aimed to take a fresh approach to automation—one that prioritized employee ergonomics and maximized the available real estate on the shop floor. They also wanted to ensure greater control on automation by minimizing dependence on external support.

After evaluating alternatives such as traditional integrators and homegrown solutions, Sears Seating partnered with Vention to co-develop a custom solution. Vention’s collaborative approach reduced deployment timelines to just 15 days—while also cutting down costs by 50% compared to traditional integration.

Vention’s intuitive manufacturing automation platform enabled Sears Seating to adopt a unique incremental model for automation. Modular conveyors and straight lines for production allowed Sears Seating to automate station by station, based on their evolving needs.

This iterative approach, combined with Vention’s MachineBuilder™ platform, ensured Sears Seating had a ready library of automation designs—eliminating the need to start from scratch each time. As a result, future deployments required significantly less effort and time, building on their learnings from each project.

While Sears Seating had previously automated some of their processes, internal efforts often posed multiple challenges, including safety concerns and a lack of standardization. Partnering with Vention made automation simpler for Sears Seating in several key ways.

Post deployment, the streamlined production line helped reduce operating costs by 20%. Faster deployment and improved efficiency also enabled Sears Seating to achieve ROI on their manufacturing automation in just 15 months.

Beyond efficiency gains, automating with Vention delivered long-term benefits such as upskilling their team and establishing standardized automation practices.

With access to a ready-made library of designs and an intuitive programming platform, Sears Seating engineers gained the internal capacity and programming skills to take ownership of future automation projects—shifting their role from support to advanced manufacturing.