Interview with mazak md

EXECUTIVESUITE

Welcome To The

Cyber World

Hiroyuki Yamazaki, Deputy Managing Director of Yamazaki Mazak Singapore checks the machine status and utilisation rates daily using the Cyber Monitor from his office.

Goh Tz’en Long talks to Hiroyuki Yamazaki, Deputy Managing Director, Yamazaki Mazak Singapore, about the opening of the latest Mazak Cyber Factory.

How do you feel about the recent opening of the Mazak Cyber Factory… are you happy with the outcome?

Yes, I am quite happy, I can say that it is very successful. I have heard opinions from many that this is a very good factory and there were many proposals to the customers. We have received many visitors from many countries to the factory, which has not happened before in the past.

I feel that many customers are becoming interested in this factory, which we are using for actual production and as a showcase and sales tool.

I understand that information from the shop floor is digitised and communicated directly to management?

Yes, in fact I have a monitor in my room and every morning I check the machine condition, status and utilisation rates of the machines.

Previously, you cannot get a clear picture of 24 equipment news Jul-Aug 2005

the machine status.

I think today there are many job shop owners/ bosses who are still relying on reports from their production managers and supervisors for update of their production status… how many parts of an order has been completed and what is the machine status, and that is not 100 percent reliable because people do make mistakes. As a boss, you can have a real-time connection, an actual figure of what the machine is doing, or if the machine is down so that you know what is the utilisation rate in the last 12 hours, in the last shift or night shift, whether the machine is running… so you know all this information.

This is all brought about because of IT. So what we have done as a company, in manufacturing is to merge IT and manufacturing technology, so we are showcasing this in our Cyber Factory as a means to promote our machines or technology and also to lead by example to our customers.

EXECUTIVESUITE Which means to say this cyber management system is a software platform that can be used by other machines as well?

We ca n u se t his sof t wa re for ot her manufacturers’ machines because we have developed an interface unit called Mazatrol Hub so customers can connect it to their machines and we can see the machine status as well.

How important is it to have real-time manufacturing data?

What you don’t see as well, in production management, very often on paper, it has all been planned, but on day three, day four, maybe the machine is down. Once you have this data, you can immediately reroute your production schedule, instead of waiting for actual g round data, I can then divert t h e b a c k l o g to Hiroyuki another machine.

Yamazaki (right) It is all about MIS and Marketing (ma na gement Manager Thomas Lee information (left) pay homage systems), if the to Yamazaki management has Mazak founder, this information Sadakichi Yamazaki. e a rly, it a llows them to plan and to make decisions real-time and accurately. This is very critical.

Mazak has actually developed the Mazatrol Fusion 640 64-bit RISC processor based CNC controller. What makes it so vital to the realisation of the Cyber Factory?

We first officially launched this in June 1998, but the development work went back as far as four to five years prior to that. We took on the challenge and saw the vision that mechanically and structurally, machines can only reach a certain level of optimisation and saw that a lot of bottlenecks happen in the office. We felt that there was a need to integrate a lot of the functions within the office, such as design office and sales processing.

Talking to the machine is always a problem, one-way communication is easy but two-way communication is always a problem. The solution is via PC platform, Ethernet connection, so the Mazatrol Fusion 640 controller has a PC fused with the CNC of the machine allowing

it do a lot of networking operations, so you can treat the machine as another PC, access information, extract information and retrieve information because there is a PC residing in the controller. However, what we don’t want to do is to allow the machine to cycle start remotely as it is too dangerous.

Part of the cyber factory concept involves remote machine monitoring?

Yes, on all the machines, we have what we call an e-Tower which gives more visual, because as you know, sometimes when the machine is cutting, you can’t open the door and gain access to the tool with chips flying out, so a closed-circuit camera allows you to do real-time monitoring, while the machine is still processing without stopping the machine.

The Mazak Cyber Factory is designed to be an advanced manufacturing facility where total factory integration is the key.

The idea is to do things concurrently without stopping the machine.

What are Mazak’s expansion plans in Southeast Asia and what kind of growth prospects can be anticipated?

A sia n economies a re growing at a rapid rate. To ke ep pace w it h t he growth in various regional countries, we are gearing ourselves up through systematic expansion and organisational strengthening. Customer satisfaction is of utmost importance even as we seek to reach new markets.

Mazak Singapore as the Southeast Asia headquarters plays a central role in our regional expansion plans. Our manufacturing operation in Singapore has seen three phases of investment. Looking ahead, we will be stepping up our presence through expansion of our factory, our technology centres, sales and technical centres in the region. MEN equipment news Jul-Aug 2005 25