Future of Manufacturing Means Working, Winning Together

Manufacturing Engineering Magazine recently spoke with two imX eXperience partners about the present and future of the manufacturing industry. The importance of collaboration to the latter will be an important theme of imX. The article, titled “Working Together, Winning Together,” appears in the May 2011 issue and features interviews with Tom Dillon, Vice Chairman, DMG / Mori Seiki USA, and John Israelsson, President, Sandvik Coromant US. Excerpts are below.

ME: Is there a greater demand these days for turnkey solutions than we saw in the past? Do manufacturing professionals want plug and play?

Israelsson: To a certain extent, absolutely, there’s more demand for turnkey solutions. But I think… customers today seem to need more help than before to develop a total solution. Maybe they don’t have all the resources… so they are looking to their suppliers—their machine tool suppliers and their cutting tool suppliers—to help them develop that total solution….

Dillon: They still talk about it being a turnkey, but in reality it’s a shared key…. We know our machines; the customer usually knows how to machine their parts as well as anyone because they are doing it already. Together we have the capacity to create positive difference on our end-users' manufacturing floors. The operative word here is “together”. They just want to do it better, faster, more economically. We can certainly assist a great deal in this area, but, in the end, it’s about working together.

ME: [imX] is designed or intended mainly as an educational event. What education-oriented activities are you planning for imX?

Israelsson: Traditionally, we talk about learning, Learning Labs, immediate things. If you think about the target audience for imX—more senior management, more decision makers—they probably are thinking more about profitability, about how to work smarter in general….

Dillon: We are now talking with customers more about where they want to be and less about where they presently are. As for imX, it’s a unique concept. If we can speak to the people who understand where they need to be in the future at their company, they can share such information with other staff members “…I saw something at imX that made good business sense to me.” We will win together, we may not “always” win together, but it will always be together.