Mazak: The Machine Tools Powering Sustainable Manufacturing

0:01Welcome to Third Angle, where we're laser cutting a greener future.

0:18I'm your host, Paul Hames from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world. the world, each powered by PTC technology.

0:36Mazak Europe is part of the Yamazaki Mazak Corporation, one of the world's largest manufacturers of machine tools and laser cutting machines. Their high performance CNC machines sculpt metal and other tough materials into complex parts using their range of ultra precise multi-axis machine tools. These parts might end up in a medical device or even form the mould for a Formula One steering wheel. Mazac is championing sustainability with a bold goal to halve its carbon footprint by 2030. From switching to solar power and electric vehicles to increasing the efficiency of their machines, Mazac's Go Green strategy is reshaping its operations.

1:18Their latest NIA range reduces CO2 emissions by 22%, and tools like their SmoothNG dashboard give customers real-time energy insights. Our producer, Helen Leonard, visited Mazak's European headquarters in Worcester to speak with engineering manager Chris Johnson. He shares their ambitious plans for sustainability and the innovations making them possible.

1:44Chris Johnson:Hello, welcome to Mazak UK. My name's Chris Johnson. I'm the engineering manager here. At Mazak European headquarters, we make machine tools and big metal cutting machines. We're in Worcester today, which is the site of the Mazak European Headquarters. We're going to have a look around the site today and I'm going to explain a little bit about what we do here. In front of us now, we've got the prop off a ship. So this is a typical component that could be made using one of our machines. Often you also find that we'll be making maybe like a mould tool for one of the components that might be manufactured in the future.

2:22Chris Johnson:We've got an example here of a Formula One steering wheel. While that itself wouldn't be made on one of our machines, the mould tool for it would be. So we're actually making the tooling that makes the end products. So again, we've got a component here that we're looking at. Probably something that most people will never see, hopefully. You can see in here we've got an artificial hip joint. Our customers are people who would make those hip joints. We also have artificial knees. This one here is an artificial shoulder joint. All of these components would be machined using our machines.

3:02Chris Johnson:Mazak, as a company, started as Yamazaki Ironworks in Nagoya in Japan. We're still a family-owned company, and we originally started making mat weaving machinery, and we started making machine tools in 1927, which obviously then moved into both milling machines and lathes. We're standing in the European Manufacturing Centre, which was created in 1987. But if you look at our map on the wall here, you can see the location of our factories around the world. So you can see we have several factories in Japan. We've got two in China, one in Singapore, one in India, which is our newest factory. We've got the factory here in Europe.

3:48Chris Johnson:And we also have a factory over in Florence in Kentucky, in the USA, that handle all of our North American operations.

4:00Chris Johnson:So Mazak has an overarching policy or procedure. We call it the Mazak Go Green strategy. The aim of that, which has come right down from our president, who considers that our corporate responsibility is to reduce our own carbon footprint. So our target is to have a 50 % reduction in our carbon footprint by the year 2030 compared to what we were doing in 2010. We have our own Scope 1, 2 and 3 based on the greenhouse gas emissions protocol. Scope 1 is direct emissions, so are we burning, say, fossil fuels ourselves and producing greenhouse gases as a result? So the way that we've been looking at that is we're trying to move all our own vehicle fleet to be electric vehicles.

4:48Chris Johnson:One of the big things that we're really trying to do, though, as a sustainability aspect, is to reduce the scope to emissions of our own customers. So we believe we can have the biggest impact on the overall economy or the overall greenhouse gas emissions of what we do by helping our customers reduce their own scope to emissions, which is the amount of energy that our machines are using to produce the parts that our customers would typically produce. Every machine that we now produce, we have a target where we're trying to reduce the amount of energy that our machines utilize to make our components.

5:27Chris Johnson:There's only so much we can do with that, obviously, because we can't break the laws of physics. It takes so much energy to essentially to cut a piece of metal off. There's only so much you can do around that. But there's a lot of the ancillary components around the machine where we can try to improve things. So a lot of the energy costs are things like pumping losses. So our machines have a lot of pumps on them. We use a lot of fluids around the machine. So by reducing the amount of energy those pumps use to pump the liquids around the machine, then we can reduce the amount of emissions that the machines use while they're machining the components.

6:03Chris Johnson:By making lots of small changes, we're actually adding it up to a very big change overall. And it's a Japanese approach, this Kaizen approach, where lots of small changes add up to being a very big impact at the end.

6:26Chris Johnson:So we've just walked into the European Technology Centre, where we display our machines and allows our customers to come and see our machines in action, allows us to talk to our customers about how they might utilise their machines to enhance their own productivity and also reduce their own carbon emissions. Here you can see one of the green innovations that's coming with our new NEO range of machines. i'm looking at the energy saver dashboard at the moment so on our control systems we've integrated almost like a smart meter that you'd have in your house so on this we've actually got a display that's showing you that's showing you currently how much energy we're consuming how much energy has been consumed since we last reset it which is ideal for working out how much energy you need to be able to produce a particular component and then obviously if you know how much energy you're using you can then actively work to try and reduce that amount of energy so you've actually got a baseline to work against previously people wouldn't know they just did what they thought now we actually have verifiable numbers that we can use to then try and reduce the amount of energy consumption that is used to create a component a lot of our customers are now using this to reduce their scope to emissions and really improve their carbon emissions for their own customers

7:43Chris Johnson:the neo range at mazac is really important to us and to the industry as a whole it's really mazac's next generation of machine where we're looking to improve both the performance of the machines and their energy efficiency so for the i800 neo we've reduced the co2 emissions by 22 percent compared to the same machine that we were making previously. That's obviously an enormous difference and really moves us in the direction of trying to be more environmentally responsible. So at Masac we take the circular economy quite seriously. We're quite lucky in that our machines are fairly large lumps of metal anyway so by default they're quite recyclable.

8:29Chris Johnson:So it's all iron and steel there's very little non-recyclable aspects about our machines. One thing that we do try to do though is make our machines last as long as possible so we will support our machines essentially indefinitely. We have machines in the field that are 40 or 50 years old that are still in daily use. The carbon emissions in making a brand new machine is roughly the same as a small family hatchback car so if we can maintain the use of existing machines through being able to help our customers keep using their machines for as long as possible and keep them to be you know have a long useful life we're effectively reducing our customers carbon emissions as well

9:16Chris Johnson:i've been here for nearly 14 years now um so i have a degree in mechanical engineering from the university of birmingham so from a very early age i knew that i was likely to end up in engineering i'm one of those kids who took everything apart and put it all back together again mazac's a really lovely company to work with because we're a sort of a medium-sized company i guess you would say we have a very hands-on approach the engineers will actually be the people who will do the design work they'll actually go down onto the shop floor when prototypes are being built and they'll get their hands dirty they'll actually help build those machines and then work out what works what doesn't work and then do any modifications that are required.

9:58Chris Johnson:We really try to put ourselves in the position of both the people who are trying to build it and in the customer's perspective.

10:11Chris Johnson:On our right we have a demonstration area showing how our machines are prepared for Industry 4 connectivity. So we've got our own portal called iConnect, which allows our customers to see how their machines are operating, allows them to access user instructions for the machines, order spare parts, allows them to get a lot closer to Mazak and get the support they need for their machines. Just here you can see our machines being loaded by a robot so we work a lot with automation suppliers. Obviously our customers want to use their machines as much as they can to get the most productivity out of them that they can.

10:53Chris Johnson:So by having automation systems that work alongside our machines, they can load parts, unload parts, they can load tooling into the machines, which obviously then means they can run the machines 24 hours a day, lights off running, improves their investments by a huge amount.

11:14Chris Johnson:So Industry 4 is quite important to our customers. One of the things that we've found our customers are doing an awful lot more is having their machines be automated. By having an automated machine, it allows them to run those machines continuously, including when nobody's actually in the factories. Industry 4 is critical in that respect because our customers need to know that their machines are making parts. So by making the parts and making them continuously, they're obviously reducing their own carbon emissions because if the machine's just sat there doing nothing, unfortunately, it does still consume some electricity but it's not doing anything useful.

11:53Chris Johnson:So Industry 4, through our iConnect portal that we've created, allows our customers to be able to visualise what their machines are currently doing and if any alarms are present on the machine, so the machine's stopped for some reason, maybe it's broken a tool or maybe the robot hasn't loaded it properly, it will give a warning to our customers so that they can go and fix that without actually having to be present 100 % of the time watching it. By making sure our machines are more productive, we're actually reducing the amount of energy they're using as well.

12:27Chris Johnson:At Masac, we're always trying to push innovation. So we're always trying to improve the energy efficiency of our machines. To that end, we have our own spindle refurbishment facility here. So the spindle is almost like the living, breathing heart of the machine. It's what actually holds either the workpiece or the cutting tool and rotates it round. It's a bit like the chuck or the motor that drives a drill round. They only have a finite life on them. There's a lot of rotating bearings in there. There's motors in there. So ultimately, you will need it replacing at some point. So what we do here is we refurbish existing spindles.

13:07Chris Johnson:So rather than creating a brand new spindle every time, we will take an existing spindle that has been taken out of a customer's machine we will give them a refurbished spindle which has been made to exactly the same specifications as if it was new so to all intents and purposes it is a new spindle and then we reassemble the spindle back to its original specification so it's as though you've got a completely brand new spindle but you haven't got all that carbon that's required to manufacture all those components from scratch again and Obviously, it ends up being faster for the end customer because they can get a new spindle a lot faster.

13:44Chris Johnson:It means that the carbon emissions of creating those spindles is much lower. And also the cost to the end customer is a lot lower because we're not making completely new components all the time. We're reusing existing components. All of these things have a net benefit to trying to make our machines more energy efficient. We're trying to reduce the amount of transformers that we use in machine, which we're looking at between 6 % and 10 % efficiency improvement straight away by doing that. And that's going across the range now, removing transformers from our machines. We're still relatively early days, I would say, in this, but we are really trying to push as hard as we can to make our machines as sustainable as possible.

14:26That was engineering manager Chris Johnson sharing how Mazak is putting decarbonisation into action. Now it's time to meet our expert, John Haller from PTC. John, Mazak delivers highly configurable products to market, which can be complex to manage on the factory floor. How does Windchill help streamline these operations in a way that not only boosts efficiency, but also supports more sustainable manufacturing practices? So there's a lot to that question. And this is an area where I have to say that Windchill really shines against our competition. we have built the capability into Windchill to set up what we call platform modularity.

15:07And what this allows customers to do is to think of all the different ways that they could configure a part, build a bill of materials inside of Windchill that has all of those parts included, and then set up rules about how those parts can be combined into a final product for a customer's needs. Why this is important is because it allows so much reuse of the products within a company. And so if you think about a customer like this, they can take that overloaded bill of materials, but have a standard set of parts, make sure that it's following the precise guidelines of what can and can't be combined together, and then quickly come up with a final configuration that meets their customers' needs.

15:57And so what we see is a dramatic improvement in overall efficiency because we can deliver all the variability that's required without having to have a ton of different unique parts for every single customer situation.

16:16Thanks to John and to Chris and our producer Helen for taking us behind the scenes of Mazak. Please rate, review and subscribe to our bi-weekly Third Angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes. Companies that make products the world relies on rely on PTC.

16:42This is an 1860 production for PTC. Executive producer is Jackie Cook Location recording by Helen Leonard Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock And music by Rowan Bishop