A Rebranding Journey

At Okuma America, we strongly believe that the best outcomes are created when various entities work together through problem-solving and innovation. This is the reason our program called Partners in THINC was established more than 17 years ago as a network of companies that provide integrated manufacturing solutions for customers.

Partners in THINC was originally centered on Okuma’s THINC control, which was the heart of Okuma machine tools’ functionality. Since then, technology has evolved to a broadened perspective that encompasses connectivity between other external digital technologies such as tooling, inspection equipment, CAD/CAM integrations, and automation systems. Today it’s about more than the control and extends to an entire universe of connected technologies that make machining and manufacturing faster, more efficient, and more advanced.

A Rebranding Journey

Hence, we underwent a rebranding journey, which I will briefly outline here. Today we have retired the name Partners in THINC and replaced it with Partners in Technology, representing a collaboration network of 45+ companies that service the metal cutting and manufacturing industries. This group comes together to solve problems and explore new productivity ideas for real-world manufacturers.

Evolving to an Ecosystem of Technologies

We began by recognizing that today’s machining process involves an entire ecosystem of technologies that have grown beyond simply focusing on the control. Okuma’s control enabled this evolution because it’s built on an open architecture Windows-based platform that makes it easy to interface with other technologies that optimize the machining process.

Representing Best-in-Breed Technologies

We also wanted the new brand to express the fact that each of our partners is selected because they represent best-in-breed technologies on the market, for today and tomorrow. The customer is really at the core of why we built this network. We want to present to our customers not just the best machine tool options on the market, but also the best available machining experience in total.

New Naming Convention

One of the things that’s very important to Okuma’s business DNA is the focus on partnerships and relationships. This can be seen in our go-to-market strategy of working with a network of distributors to be as close to customers as possible from a geographic standpoint.

We went through an exercise of considering a different path for the naming convention, but it kept coming back to something so central to Okuma’s DNA, and that is the business partnership model. Therefore, the name “Partners in Technology” was chosen.

A Meaningful Design

The design we chose is meaningful in many ways. Our partnership program is designed to be rooted in and around Okuma, and Okuma technology. Beyond that we have chosen best-in-class partners to augment and bring added value to our machine tools as together we serve our customers’ needs.

Looking at the full-color version of the logo, the blue section represents Okuma providing a strong foundation with our machine tools and our technology.

The three other pillars, shown in gold, silver, and bronze, represent different tiers in our partnership program, starting with those that engage the most with Okuma and bring the most value to our collective customers being in the gold tier. All three tiers represent varying levels of participation, but with the same underlying theme that all have been hand-selected as top performers in their market sectors.

In total, the program is designed to allow partners to ascertain and aspire to different levels of engagement that reap benefits for them and ultimately for our customers. This enables us to package solutions for Okuma users and work together in a consultative fashion for them. Ultimately, they win, and we all win.

Supporting Our Mission

All of this supports and expresses Okuma America’s mission, “we passionately pursue a customer for life”.

We’re cultivating a program that brings together like-minded manufacturers and solution providers into a system that’s pre-vetted and therefore easily installed and utilized by our customer base.

Ultimately this partnership is one we passionately pursue, involving the right people and expertise, to bring new possibilities for shops – optimizing their operations in a streamlined and highly effective way.

About Annette Carroll
Annette Carroll is Director of Marketing, Okuma America Corporation.
Follow Annette on LinkedIn.