Building upon its "Rock Solid" business foundation and international leadership in the machine tool industry, Yamazaki Mazak has announced the construction of a new production facility in Inabe City, Mie Prefecture, Japan. The new Yamazaki Mazak Inabe Plant will combine - as key components of Mazak's iSMART Factory concept - production automation and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology.

The Inabe Plant follows suit with Mazak's Kentucky plant where the iSMART Factory concepts are already well entrenched, as well as with the existing Yamazaki Mazak Oguchi Plant in Japan that will be a full iSMART Factory by the end of 2016. As an iSMART Factory and with 56,000 sq. m. of planned floor space for manufacturing larger size machine tools, the new Inabe plant will boost productivity by more than 50 percent.

Mazak's iSMART Factory is one that uses advanced manufacturing cells and systems together with full digital integration to achieve free-flow data sharing in terms of process control and operation monitoring. In the iSMART Factory, the MTConnect open communications protocol works with process support software and provides connectivity and the capability to monitor then harvest data from all the different production floor machines, cells, devices and processes.

Operation from the current Yamazaki Mazak Seiko in the Mie Prefecture will transfer to the new plant in stages. Completion and full operation of the ¥20 billion Inabe Plant is scheduled for 2019.