Mazak Corporation has always been top innovator in the manufacture of highly advanced machine tools, continuously evolving its operations to effectively meet the unique technology and support needs of its customers in an ever-evolving marketplace. And this year, the company celebrates 40 years of successfully growing its North American presence to constantly keep its customers as productive and profitable as possible.
According to Brian Papke, president of Mazak Corporation, true manufacturing success requires more than just constructing a building and calling it a factory. It requires having a forward-thinking mindset to ward off complacency, enormous amounts of dedication and plain old hard work from everyone involved in the process.
When Mazak got its start in Florence, Kentucky, in 1974, the company had a fairly small presence in a city that was, and still is, centrally located to several major U.S. manufacturing companies. That quickly changed, however, as the company continued to grow year after year and pioneer new methods to improve its manufacturing operations.
Now that Mazak’s presence in Kentucky has matured over the past four decades, today the company occupies an 800,000-square-foot manufacturing campus that consists of five buildings. In fact, since 1974, the campus has undergone multiple expansions, each time advancing the company’s engineering operations, product development capabilities and production efficiency to effectively support the growing technology demands of its customers across all manufacturing industry segments. This includes instituting a Production-On-Demand approach into its manufacturing plant as well as being the first machine tool manufacturing company to connect all of its factory-floor equipment to one another through a plant-wide integration of MTConnect.
While the road hasn’t been completely smooth over the past 40 years, given the economy’s ups and downs as well as continuous market transitions, Mazak has persevered and learned valuable lessons along the way that will help the company continue to grow and be the best in the machine tool industry – today, tomorrow and always.