Trane®, a global climate innovator – established in 1885 by James Trane in La Crosse, WI, is a leader in sustainable heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) solutions. While Trane has multiple manufacturing facilities around the world, it is most recognized for its La Crosse facility which manufactures the CenTraVac® water-cooled chillers, ranging from 200 to 4,000 tons in cooling capacity.
Trane chillers are highly customized products, engineered to meet multiple customer specifications. These high-mix custom products require extensive manual labor. In a small rural community, it can be difficult to recruit and retain a skilled labor force. To address this, Trane implemented three welding cells using Fanuc robotics systems. As a result of this initial investment into automation, they were able to overcome the skilled labor shortage gap and benefit from an overall reduction in operating costs.
Their biggest challenge and opportunity for automation was the manual, labor-intensive rolling, trimming and inspection process of thousands of tubes. Because it was a manual inspection, there was no way of knowing how long it would take, leading to the risk of missed shipments.
Trane was hesitant to implement an automated solution for this tube rolling application because an operator would have to dedicate over 80 hours to the programming while keeping the robot offline and out of production costing the company time and money. However, the team at Trane agreed that the manual labor process along with the teach pendant programming was not sustainable, too challenging, and time-consuming.
Thanks to a few meetings with Hypertherm Associates Software Sales Manager, Cory John, Doug Watkins, Senior Welding Engineer at Trane and John Huster, President of Sofos Robotics Co., a trusted Robotmaster integrator partner, they were able to quickly implement the software in the welding cells. Because Trane could immediately see the benefits in the welding cells, they saw the potential to utilize Robotmaster software in other areas, including the tube rolling process.
Now using the Robotmaster Offline Programming (OLP) method it only takes 30 minutes to program the tube-rolling cell, instead of 80+ hours without taking the robot offline. Trane’s robotic systems increased their output by 50% with zero missed tubes and they are seeing ~38% improvement in their cycle time.
To see how your customers might benefit, ask your Hypertherm account representative for more information.