Mazak: The Machine Tools Powering Sustainable Manufacturing

Mazak Europe is part of the Yamazaki Mazak Corporation, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of CNC machine tools and laser cutting machines. These machines use ultra-precise multi-axis tools to shape the components used in everything from medical devices to Formula One cars. 

But Mazak’s focus is not just on performance, it is on sustainability, with a bold goal to halve its carbon footprint by 2030.

We visit Mazak’s European headquarters in Worcester, UK to meet Engineering Manager Chris Johnson. He shares how the company is transforming its operations through it’s "Go Green" strategy. From solar power and electric vehicles to energy-efficient machines and smart factory dashboards, Mazak is reducing not only their own carbon emissions, but the carbon emissions of their customers too. 

Find out more about Mazak UK here.

Find out more about Windchill here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Location recording by Helen Lennard. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle where we are laser cutting a greener future.

I am your host, Paul Hayes 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. Each powered by PTC Technology.

Mazak 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 mold for a Formula One [00:01:00] steering wheel.

Mazak 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, Mazak's Go Green strategy is reshaping its operations. Their latest near range reduces CO2 emissions by 22%. And tools like their Smooth NG 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.

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 are in Worcester today, which is the site of the [00:02:00] Mazak European headquarters, and 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 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 mold tool for one of the,  , components that might be manufactured in the future. 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 mold tool for it would be. So we are 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.

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 are standing in the European Manufacturing Center, 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 their factory here in Europe, and we also have a factory over in Florence, in Kentucky, in the USA that handles all of our North American operations.

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, one, two, and three based on the greenhouse gas emissions protocol. Scope one 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've trying to move all our own vehicle fleets to be electric vehicles.

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. [00:05:00] 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, to make our components. 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, a piece of metal off. You know? 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, the energy costs are things like p ping losses. So our machines have a lot of p ps on them.

We use a lot of fluids around the machine. So by reducing the amount of energy those p ps used to p p the liquids around the machine, then we can reduce [00:06:00] the amount of emissions that the machines use while they're machining the components. By making lots of small changes, we're actually adding it up to a very big change overall.

 , and it's that, it's a Japanese approach to the, this kaizen approach where lots of small changes add up to being a very big impact, at the end.

So we've just walked into the European Technology Center where we display our machines and it allows our customers to come and see our machines in action, allows us to talk to our customers about how they might utilize their machines to enhance their own productivity and also reduce our 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. [00:07:00] So on this, we've actually got a display that's showing you, that's showing you currently how much energy we are cons ing, how much energy has been cons ed 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 n bers that we can use to then try and reduce the amount of energy cons ption 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.

The NEO range at Mazak is really important to us and to the industry as a whole. It's really Mazak's next generation of machine where we are looking to improve both the performance of the machines and their energy efficiency. [00:08:00] So for the i-800 NEO, we've reduced the CO2 emissions by 22% 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 Mazak we take the circular economy quite seriously.  , we're quite lucky in that our machines are fairly large l ps of metal anyway, so by default they're quite recyclable.  , 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, when 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 [00:09:00] 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 a long, useful life, we're effectively reducing our customer's carbon emissions as well.

I've been here for nearly 14 years now.  , 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. Mazak's a really lovely company to work with because we are a sort of a medi  sized company, I guess you would say.

We have,  , a very hands-on approach that 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.

We [00:10:00] really try to put ourselves in the, in the position of both the people who are trying to build it and in the customer's perspective.

On my right we have a demonstration area showing how our machines are,  , prepared for Industry 4.0 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. So by having automation systems that work alongside our machines, they can load [00:11:00] 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.

So Industry 4.0 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. And by having an automated machine, it allows them to run those machines continuously, including when nobody's actually in the factories.

Industry 4.0 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. 'cause if the machines just sat there doing nothing. Unfortunately, it does still cons e some electricity, but it's not doing anything useful.

So Industry 4.0 through our iConnect portal that we've created allows our customers [00:12:00] to be able to visualize what their machines are currently doing, and if any alarms are present on the machines, the machines stopped for some reason. Maybe it's broken the 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 a hundred percent 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.

At Mazak, we're always trying to push innovation, so we're always trying to improve the energy efficiency of our machines. Again, one of the things that we've been having a look at,  , if we think about our own facilities, we are trying to add a lot more solar power to our facilities. So if you have a look over in Japan,  , a lot of our factories now have solar panels all over the roofs.

All of our technology centers in Europe, you know, in a large part, have got,  , solar panels on the roof of those. We've got [00:13:00] electric chargers, all of the technology centers now, so our customers can visit us and use electronic vehicles. So one of the things that we're really trying to do as a business is just be more accessible to people who are trying to be more energy efficient themselves.

 , we're trying to reduce our own energy cons ption. Obviously as time goes on, we're trying to make our machines more energy efficient. So we have that net goal. We're trying to be 50% lower by 2030 compared to 2010. The new NEO range is our next step forward in trying to make our machines more energy efficient.

We're still working with our suppliers, our own partners, to work out how we can make our machines more efficient. We're trying to improve our control systems as well, so our control systems can produce the parts faster, and again, that makes them more energy efficient again. We're having a look at, maybe we can use different types of coolant p ps, different types of p ps, reducing our air cons ption.

All of these things have a, a net benefit to trying to make our machines more energy efficient. We're trying [00:14:00] to reduce the amount of transformers that we use in the machine, which we're looking at between six 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.

That was engineering manager Chris Johnson, sharing how Mazak is putting decarbonization 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. [00:15:00] We have built the capability into Windchill to set up what we call platform modularity. And what this allows customers to do is to think of all the different ways that they could configure apart, 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 that meets their customer's needs. 

And so what we see is a dramatic [00:16:00] 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.

Thanks 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.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive Producer is Jacqui Cook. Location recording by Helen Lennard, sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. A music by Rowan Bishop.