Florence, Kentucky, June 21, 2010 – Mazak Corporation has announced that it has contracted to begin construction on a completely new facility to house its Southwest Technology Center & Regional Headquarters in Houston, Texas. Representing the company’s continuous investment in American manufacturing the new facility will offer support to manufacturers in all industries, with a special focus on those serving the energy sector.
With construction beginning in July 2010, the new 30,000 sq. ft. Southwest Technology Center will be constructed on a 4.5-acres of land owned by Mazak and located at the intersection of Beltway 8 and Green Crossing Boulevard. When complete, the new facility will mark Mazak’s third and largest expansion of the Southwest Technology Center, which was originally founded in 1978.
“Throughout the economy of the past two years, Mazak has consistently been a vocal advocate of continued investment in American manufacturing,” says Brian Papke, President of Mazak. “It’s something we encourage our customers to do and something we do ourselves. We’ve seen a lot of companies scale back their investment levels over the past several years. We fully understand there may be economic reasons to do so, but we believe that it is an important time to invest in order to be competitive in the future. Additionally, we recognize the growing importance of creating machine tools that are not only more productive, but that are also energy efficient and environmentally sound. This new facility will be a place where we can work together with our customers to address and develop improvements in all of these critical areas.”
The size of the new Southwest Technology Center will allow for cutting demonstrations, service and applications support for some of Mazak’s largest machining centers, including a large range of Multi-Tasking machines from simple turning machines with milling to highly sophisticated 5-axis machines with multiple spindles and turrets. The Southwest Technology Center serves as a regional service hub with 20 field service engineers based out of the facility, along with 5 phone support engineers, several of whom are bilingual to meet the diverse language needs of the region.
The new facility will also house a large, 100-seat learning and conference area for meetings, regional seminars and training events that will be presented by both Mazak and VIP suppliers in the industry. With increased complexity of customer parts and corresponding sophistication of machines, the importance of training and support will be enhanced with the new facility in the area.
A grand opening is anticipated in June 2011 including a complete range of Mazak products demonstrating various applications.