Mazak Launches Assembly Operations at New Plant in Japan

Mazak Corp. (Mazak) has announced the start of assembly operations at its latest production facility in Inabe City, Mie Prefecture, Japan. The company celebrated the completion of the initial construction phase of its sixth Japanese Mazak facility and its eleventh worldwide with an open house event that customers and distributors from Japan and around the world attended through the Mazak International Machine Tool Association (MIMTA) tour program.

While the final stage of construction is ongoing, the Inabe plant has already begun producing new VARIAXIS Series five-axis machining centers and VERSATECH Series five-axis double-column machining centers. The facility also includes significant floor space devoted to performing test cuts for customers. When the $176-million (¥20-billion) facility is finished in 2019, the 603,000 square-foot (56,000 square-meter) production floor will take over operations from the current Seiko plant in nearby Kuwana City, which will serve as a machining facility for the Inabe plant.

The new Inabe facility includes many features essential to the manufacturing of high-precision machine tools, including Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) monitoring technology and environmental controls that prevent temperature changes beyond ±1ºC on the production floor. The current operations already have increased Yamazaki Mazak’s overall production capacity in Japan by 20 percent, and the company plans to prioritize the expansion of its production floor to meet high levels of worldwide machine-tool demand.

Like the company’s United States headquarters in Florence, Kentucky, the Inabe plant ultimately will become a Mazak iSMART Factory. Mazak says that these factories represent complete digital integration with the use of state-of-the-art manufacturing technology. Mazak iSMART Factories leverage the MTConnect open-communications protocol and Smooth Technology process-support software toward harvesting data from production floor machines, cells, devices and processes. In addition, Mazak iSMART Factories feature high degrees of automation, five-axis machines and multi-tasking technology, which are components that will eventually be a part of all Mazak factories worldwide.

To learn more about joining future MIMTA tour groups to discover more about the company’s Japanese operations, contact the nearest Mazak Technology Center or Technical Center.