Increasing Sewing Quality and Performance Time and Time Again
It’s hard to find highly-skilled operators to sew seat upholstery. It takes a year to get a good sewer. It takes many years to get a great one. It takes the best operators to get consistent pleating.
In the 1990s, pleating drove the need for Seats Inc. to get into electronic, programmable industrial sewing machines. They design and manufacture seating for long haul trucks, earth moving equipment, industrial, military and emergency vehicles. Seats not only assembles finished seating products, but fabricates nearly all of the seat components as well.
Manual setup for pleats is a time-consuming hand operation. The operator has to place a pattern over the material and chalk the pattern, which is a complicated process – even for the best operators. Errors really stand out. With manual pleating, Seats started experiencing skipped stitches and thread breakage because of the material thickness. Consistency is vital in the industry. It was getting hard for Seats to guarantee consistency with the manual sewing process. Also, at 400 stitches per minute, manual sewing had reached its upper limit in terms of throughput.
The Future Looks Bright
The large-area, electronically-controlled, programmable sewing machine can also be linked with other machines to enable Mitsubishi Electric e-F@ctory functionality. The enhanced connectivity will allow Seats to:
- Track production across the factory
- Orchestrate factory operations
- Enable preventive maintenance
This ongoing innovation, quality and performance are some of the many reasons Seats has been a Mitsubishi Electric customer for over a quarter of a century. “Mitsubishi Electric has always been a super partner for us. Transitioning from manual to programmable sewing was one of our easiest startups.”
What’s next? Robotics is coming to sewing. This will allow Seats to continue to be one of the most design-forward seat suppliers. They’re currently putting nine different panels with different colors and contours on the facing alone. John says, “We need to stay on the forefront of that. Mitsubishi Electric can help us do that.”
Become Our Next Success Story
We love our customers and the challenges they bring to us. We also like to let our customers shine by discussing how we worked together to solve their biggest challenges. If you have a challenge that needs to be solved and would like to be our next BIG success story, reach out to us and let’s connect!
This Is Now
Seats now uses Mitsubishi Electric PLK-G10050 industrial sewing machine, which delivers:
- High-speed sewing with industry-leading tact – at 2800 stitches per minute, Seats more than doubled throughput again
- Powerful penetration force – even at the start of stitching and thread trimming the 750W direct-drive servo motor carries out low-speed sewing with ease
- Prevention of skipped stitches and thread breakage – even when stitching material thickness changes, digital feedback control on the programmable presser foot mechanism prevents sewing quality and consistency issues
Mitsubishi Electric continues to advance industrial sewing machines with e-stitches, e-Patterns and automatic presser foot adjustment.
