Mazak Corp. launches assembly operations at new plant

Mazak Corp., Florence, Kentucky, 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 11th worldwide with an open house event attended by customers and distributors from across Japan and, via the Mazak International Machine Tool Association (MIMTA) tour program, around the world.

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 on these large machine tools. 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 manufacture of high-precision machine tools, including advanced Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) monitoring technology and environmental controls that prevent temperature changes beyond ±1ºC on the production floor. The current operations have already 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 North American headquarters in Florence, Kentucky, the Inabe Plant will ultimately become a Mazak iSMART Factory™. A concept that represents the complete digital integration of factories 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, components that will eventually be a part of all Mazak factories worldwide.