New DS1 – What’s In It for You?

This guest blog post features thoughts from Greg Hartwig, Vice President of Sales for Hartwig, an Okuma America Corporation distributor.

Over the past 13 years I’ve had several opportunities to visit Okuma’s manufacturing facilities in Japan. When you visit some of the older facilities, you can see Okuma CNC machines that have been running for more than 20 years in production. This gives you an idea of the quality of the machine tools, and makes an impressive statement about their long-lasting value. Recently I had the chance to visit Okuma’s newest facility, the DS1 (“Dream Site” 1). The scene is dramatically different here, where there’s a lot of automation in place. To operate 20 machines there are only 10 workers per shift, so that’s impressive. There are automatic pallet changers, 3 flexible manufacturing systems and lots of really cool technology.

Reduced Costs, Reduced Lead Time and More

All of the automation reduces labor costs of course, so that’s an efficiency that will benefit everyone. One of the other goals for the new plant is to cut lead times for machine delivery, and the new facility will reduce lead times by half. The DS1 facility also has the capability to produce a high variety of CNC machine types in low volumes. And the automation allows for several other advantages as well. Now Okuma operators can program machines and put setups in place that allow them to run almost any part they want, at any time. They can also kit things. So, for example, if you have five parts in an assembly, and you need several of these assemblies complete by the end of the day, the machine and the FMS talk back and forth and produce the kits, and then alert the user when they’re done. That’s the ultimate in job scheduling.

Other DS1 Highlights

• It’s well known that when Okuma brings a new technology to market, it’s bullet-proof. Now the lead time from drawing board to production has decreased significantly. This means Okuma innovations will come to market faster.
• Many other builders use a hodgepodge of sources to put their machines together, which can cause problems. Okuma uses Okuma machines to build their own machines from beginning to end, and it was fun to see this in action. Plus Okuma’s single-source approach (building the mechanical and the electrical together) makes things easier on customers (and distributors like us here at Hartwig), because the machine and control work together seamlessly. It’s like the brain and the body. When they come into the world as one whole entity, the way they work intuitively together is a beautiful thing.
• It was great to see the overall quality of craftsmanship. One example of this is the amount of time Okuma’s “artists” take in hand scraping machines. Hand scraping, which enhances machine accuracy and long-term stability, can take anywhere from 11-78 hours per machine, depending on requirements for the particular model. I had the opportunity to watch them hand scrape an LB3000 EX, and it was really interesting – at each staging area they’re doing their own hand scraping and fitting for each particular assembly.
• We also visited the Kani facility, which encompasses five plants. One of these plants is dedicated to producing over 40 double column machining centers per month. This high volume of production is key to Okuma’s ability to fulfill over half of the world’s double column market share.

Customer Reviews

We had several Okuma customers with us on the trip, and I heard one thing over and over from them: “I had no idea how big Okuma really is, how much breadth there is of machine offerings.” I even heard this from guys who’ve been using Okumas for 20 years! It was an exciting experience for everyone ¬ and the benefits of DS1’s efficiencies are going to make a lot more people excited too.

Greg Hartwig is Vice President of Sales for Hartwig, an Okuma America Corporation distributor.

[Peter Zelinski, Senior Editor for Modern Machine Shop magazine, also attended the DS1 tour. He did a great job covering this in his recent article “New Okuma Plant Relies on Automation, Production Control.”]