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Mazak’s Kentucky-built SYNCREX Series – the company’s entry into the Swiss-style turning machine market – provides shops a feature-rich machine platform that meets the growing demand for both low-mix/high-volume production and high-mix/low-volume production. While they are especially adept at machining complex, unconventional parts, the machines in the series can also run any part that could be turned on a standard lathe.

Whether or not shops want to admit it, automation is the path forward for manufacturing. As skilled labor shortages continue to plague our industry and consumer demand surges, automation is necessary to increase the output of existing workforces and expanding production capacity to meet customer needs. Additionally , automation ensures process consistency, improves quality, can enhance safety, helps lower overall costs and reduces the risk of scrap.

The establishment of NextGen cars in the NASCAR Cup Series has had a profound impact at Team Penske. As a result of the rules and requirements surrounding those cars, the team went from building all of its own cars on site and manufacturing the majority of the components for those cars to basically purchasing off-the-shelf cars.

In manufacturing, there are instances when the simplicity of conversational-type part programming applies, and then there are those applications when EIA/ISO G-code programming is a must. Aerospace and medical machining programs, for instance, often require incremental control and documentation of tool movement, and automotive production programs must be free of all time-consuming machine motion where fractions of seconds become critical when producing hundreds of thousands of parts.

Industrial machining computer numerical control (CNC) programming language has evolved through many iterations since its inception in the 1950s. Standardized in the early 1960s by the Electronic Industries Alliance as RS-247-D and now known as EIA/ISO machine programming – or G-code – it has become the foundational and most widely used protocol for precision control of vertical and horizontal machining centers, lathes and additive 3D printers, detailing every movement and action necessary to produce parts ranging from the simple to the unfathomably complex.

Every business and every consumer can provide their own unique examples of product delivery delays and cancellations resulting from pandemic-bred supply chain interruptions. As a provider of premium machine tools worldwide, Mazak is no exception. In the last two years, the time required to get machine tool parts from Asia to the U.S. has essentially doubled, and the delays do not end when the cargo arrives in this country.

For our workforce development plan at Mazak, we applied well thought out strategies to how we approached job descriptions, compensation, training/advancement and work scheduling. All in an effort to improve our employee recruitment and retention.