Cooper Standard deploy WITNESS to enhance decision making

A fast changing market

Cooper Standard is a global supplier of fuel systems, rubber and plastic components in the automotive industry. Headquartered in Novi, Michigan, USA, it employs more than 30,000 employees across 20 countries. The automotive market has always been fast changing and companies are maintaining competitive advantage through adoption of new solutions characterized by increasingly high levels of technological advancement and consequently high business risk. Simple methods of risk analysis and process improvement are not guaranteeing outcomes of ambitious solution projects in the necessary time horizons and so Cooper Standard turned to predictive simulation.

Simulation to optimise processes

The AMC company helped Cooper Standard by implementing Lanner’s  WITNESS simulation software to optimise processes across their manufacturing plants located in Myslenice and Czestochowa, Poland.

In the opinion of Mr Tomasz Misiowiec, simulation project leader at Cooper Standard, Myslenice, "The complexity and variability that we faced could only be analysed using our WITNESS simulation model. Detailed analysis of multiple process scenarios enabled our design team to convince stakeholders to undertake ambitious changes across the whole plant. Thanks to this approach, we now know where we are, we can quantify risks and confidently plan our logistics operations while addressing many other operational problems."

According to Mr Kamil Filek, who modeled the production planning process and organization of internal transport in WITNESS, thanks to WITNESS simulation the company is now able to:

• Minimize the uncertainty in implementing new solutions.
• Compare several variants of process designs and find the best.
• Identify the hazards in the planned process showing their impact on the environment and eliminate them before the final implementation.
• Verify the proposed solutions in a very short time, greatly accelerating the decision-making process.

Summing up results produced from the Witness model after only a few weeks Mr. Kamil Filek admits that "... initially we approached simulation with a degree of cynicism and decided to test the tool by only simulating the logistics process. WITNESS proved itself very well and gave us the answer to our questions. Through subsequent simulation experiments, we have improved the proposed settings of the machines for the new production area and built a fully developed concept of the internal logistics system. "

Industry 4.0 and beyond

"The use of WITNESS simulation in the decision-making process has allowed us to thoroughly understand and analyze our processes so we can define the best solution in a much shorter time span. Industries such as the automotive sector, are paving the way for Industry 4.0-enabled services and the use of predictive simulation has enabled Cooper Standard to join this ride."