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News Release from: 600 Centre
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 14 February 2005
Grinding machine builder focuses on
nano-machining
The world's largest manufacturer of grinding machines sees the next five years as being most critical and regards the business 'front end' as nanometre machining technology.
For Okamoto, the world's largest manufacturer of grinding machines, with annual sales of GBP 140 million and employing some 1,200 people, the next five years will be the most critical in its almost 70 year history of involvement in abrasive-based machining Represented in the UK by 600 Centre of Shepshed, near Loughborough Okamoto has restructuring over the last two years and transformed the business into three distinct sectors of operation
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 22 May 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Tokyo headquartered company has now taken the front end of the business into ground-breaking ultra-high nanometre machining technology, adding the capability of being a world-leading solution provider while maintaining the volume orientated middle to low end grinding machine production from which it has built its international reputation.
Chairman Taizo Hosoda, is willing to admit that market forces in Okamoto's traditional business area of mainly surface grinding, but also the supply of a whole range of cylindrical, internal and rotary grinding equipment for production, mould, die and toolmaking sectors, has led to a complete change in thinking.
He maintains: "You cannot prosper as a business today just selling 2,000 made to order grinding machines a year to a catchment 20,000 or so customers in 80 countries." His reasoning is based on the decline in the volume market for grinding machines in general and added pressure due to lower prices from China, Thailand, Italy and Spain.
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That scenario makes it difficult to maintain a hard won market share in surface grinding of 40 per cent in the US and Japan and 15 per cent in Europe.
"As a market shifts you must look to changing the technology available to create opportunities and provide new solutions.
To achieve that, the challenge is to engineer the change," he insists.
Since 2002 Hosoda has taken brave steps.
He has almost completely changed the key people leading the company to drive technology development forward in Okamoto, appointing Jitsuo Nishimoto as President and George Gyo Itoh as General Manager of Overseas Sales.
New appointments across the board have resulted in the average age in the company dropping by a massive 10 years to around 35 for the 270 people employed in the Annaka headquarters and factory at Gunma, some 50 miles from Tokyo where special machines are now built.
Of the 270, 56 are now devoted to design, another 56 are employed in research and development, 42 in electronics and software and 35 in application engineering which clarifies the new order of thinking.
And, according to Company President Nishimoto, this mirrors the fast changing employment trends in the company's new larger corporation customers.
Nishimoto has been largely responsible for switching more than five per cent of sales revenue to boost research and development, and his design and development teams have engaged co-operative development projects with Keio and Tokyo Universities in Japan and the Gintec Institute in Singapore, a country where Okamoto has produced its precision surface, cylindrical and internal grinding machines since 1973.
Key to these development projects, principally engaged in moving abrasive machining technology into the high echelons of achieving nanometre (10-9) tolerances on a production basis for aerospace, semi-conductor, information technology and liquid crystal display sectors, is a factor that tends to allude most machine tool companies worldwide.
Okamoto's new customers - which include some of the best known names in these manufacturing sectors - have been willing to stump up considerable sums for the development of advanced solutions involving grinding and surface machining processes that they need for future survival in their high technology product arenas.
Gyo Itoh points to the critical markets for abrasive technology, such as the LCD and plasma screen, semi-conductor industry, wafer production and surface measurement instrument sectors.
But, he maintains of equal importance is Okamoto's focus on the 'Mother' machine technology required to develop and build machine tools capable of creating the equipment that is able to maintain and reproduce to the highly challenging nanometre tolerances.
When questioned on the wisdom of focusing on what could be a described as high risk and new areas of technology, he is adamant: "Customers need these solutions and are willing to pay a fair price to achieve them because the long term rewards are so great.
We are working so very close with many customers and moving so fast that it would be difficult for competitors to catch up.
But we are not complacent and ignoring our existing markets.
Most important is that we are learning how to spin-off technology into our standard product giving improved accuracy and performance and, through investment, a more cost-effectively produced product for our customers." This was demonstrated at the recent JIMTOF machine tool exhibition in Tokyo with three new generation surface grinding machines being launched featuring hydrostatic table technology and linear motor drives.
The ultra-precision surface grinder (UPG) with programmable hydrostatic slideways and linear motor drive introduces a viable process alternative to creep feed grinding at a lower investment cost.
Able to reciprocate over a 10mm stroke at 650 passes a minute and having a minimum increment of 0.01 microns with CCD camera to view and monitor the profile generated, it is aimed at providing a more practical solution than creep feed grinding for producing punches and carbide tooling inserts and, for instance, precision grinding slots for the connector industry.
The UPR, a programmable rotary table grinder with hydrostatic slides on cross and vertical axes and air bearing on its 300mm rotary table, has been primarily developed for the bearing industry.
It is able to grind inner and outer bearing races to different widths in the same cycle with runout, parallelism and squareness held to sub-micron tolerances.
The third machine, a large UPG 408 NC surface grinder with 4000mm table, is available with a table up to 10m in length.
The machine on the show stand is due to be installed at the Annaka factory as a 'Mother' machine.
It is four times more rigid than a conventional slideway bearing machine due to its six face programmable hydrostatic bearing that eliminates metal to metal contact and slideway wear.
The table can accept loads up to 5,500kg that does not even need to be evenly distributed because the hydrostatic bearing will automatically measure and compensate the thickness of the oil film through the CNC control to produce an unbelievable flatness guarantee of 0.5 micron per metre.
But it is the high end of the business where development is paying dividends.
Okamoto has already built and delivered machines for micro-electronics components, for media storage, visual displays and back lighting tooling production for the latest and future generations of mobile phone screens.
It has developed and delivered new machines for grinding, slicing, lapping and polishing the new generation semi-conductor silicon wafers to help the industry to move from normal eight inch to larger 300 mm wafer disc size.
Already, the company has delivered machines for producing the IC chip for credit cards where the Okamoto back grinder is producing perfect flatness on 100 micron thick chips.
It has recently developed and has under test a machine for grinding the next generation of chips just 50 micron thick and is well underway in developing a 30 micron chip capability.
Such is the take up, that Okamoto has already achieved a 90 per cent market share for the back grinding machine in Taiwan where most IC chips are now made.
Currently in build at the headquarters in Annaka is the first of its SPP 4000 Pitch Polishing machines.
Weighing in at over 400 tonnes and worth some GBP 7 million, this single machine has been developed to combine lapping and polishing for producing optical flats, precision slideways and ultra-high precision finished surfaces.
The table is made of stone segments with a layer of asphalt to cover its 9.8 metre diameter which is carried on a large high precision hydrostatic bearing.
Slurry, controlled to a one micron grit size, is fed to the table and a continuous dressing ring ensures flatness is maintained.
No pressure is applied to the component during processing and flatness tolerances lower than 0.3 micron over an area of 1m2 can be maintained.
As Hosoda explains, Okamoto is an international company with plants in Tokyo, Singapore, Thailand and America with a its customer base spanning leading corporations such as GE, Panasonic, Boeing, BMW, Honda, Toyota, Bosch, Intel, Nikon, IBM, Samsung and Canon.
The latest developments in information technology demand ever-growing special solutions to achieve and maintain high orders of surface flatness and an ever higher capability to measure what is produced.
So to the future he points out: "As our working relationships develop in the West, it is quite probable that Okamoto will be investing in Europe within the next five years.".
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