August cover story: Turning on a centre of excellence

The official opening of Citizen Machinery UK’s new Centre of Excellence in the West Midlands took place recently to an audience of invited guests, senior Japanese management, European distributors and local dignitaries.

Ed Hill found out more about what this new facility will offer customers.

With uncertainty continuing to shroud UK manufacturing, it was heartening to attend an opening event that demonstrated there is still confidence in the sector and a willingness to invest in facilities that will help the industry in the longer term.

Citizen Machinery UK’s new £3 million Centre of Excellence in Brierley Hill, West Midlands will not only provide a new modern facility to showcase the company’s latest turning centre and lathe technology, it will also carry out pre-delivery work on high-value, automated turnkey installations complete with programming, automation, tooling and accessories for customers who increasingly demand this from their machine tool suppliers.

Importantly, the new site will also mean that support for the company’s UK customers, who are predominately situated in the Midlands area, will be closer than its headquarters that remain in Bushy, near Watford. The new building will also house an international conference area, customer training school, applications engineering department as well as administrative offices.

Additionally, as Citizen UK is the Japanese machine tool manufacturer’s primary division for its European arm, it will also be a distribution hub for sales of machines in France, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, the Middle East and Africa.

New capacity

A former home to the regional newspaper The Express and Star, Citizen’s new Centre of Excellence on the Hurst Business Park, consists of 980m² of office space plus an additional 680m² of newly built showroom and technical facilities.

Citizen bought the site last year before embarking on a rapid 26 week build programme which included extensive groundworks to stabilise redundant mineshafts that are a common feature of the area. As well as the extra floorspace, the new extension includes a 16-tonne capacity crane to manoeuvre the entire range of Citizen’s Cincom sliding head lathes, Miyano fixed head machines and MC multi-station machining cells.

In fact, the need to find a new centre has increased since Citizen merged with Miyano back in 2011 and the facility will be able to house some of Miyano’s biggest fixed-head, 51mm and 64mm bar capacity turning centres.

The new centre has already proved its worth. Back in June it was the location for Citizen’s latest three-day open house which attracted approximately 300 visitors and resulted in more than £2 million worth of business.

Darren Wilkins, deputy managing director, Citizen Machinery UK said: “26 weeks was a tall order to complete the build but everyone involved from the construction company to ourselves and the project managers has performed brilliantly.

“In the last two years our business has grown significantly. Not just the number of staff we employ, but also our orders which are still at a record level. However, we haven’t had enough space to process machinery quickly enough, so this facility gives us more capacity.”

He continued: “There is a noticeable trend to supply more turnkey solutions to customers which inevitably means more pre-delivery, trial and development work before the customer gets a machine.

“Of course, ‘turnkey’ can mean a number of things. It may simply mean we have to set-up the machine and help to programme it for a customer, or it could be something that is fully automated and engineered by us and where we have designed a whole process for making a component. The need for that sort of offer is something that increases every year, so we need more space, more time and engineering capacity in order to carry out that work.

“This building was a great opportunity for us not just because of the location but also because it had more than enough office space than we required and enough land so we could build the new extension alongside it,” he added.

“It was quite rare to find an existing site like this given current planning restrictions for sufficient parking and other requirements. We needed a fair amount of additional land to be able to extend the technical centre and if we hadn’t found this building, we would have had to consider new land development which is difficult to find, expensive, or in a location that’s not ideal.”

Watch this space

The Citizen Group began selling its turning machines back in 1961 as an offshoot of its well-known wristwatch business. In fact, all the components for Citizen watches are made on its own CNC turning machines.

It first started selling machines in the UK back in 1974 through its agent NC Engineering which in 2006 became Citizen Machinery UK, a wholly owned subsidiary of Citizen Group.

Since then sales of Citizen machines in Europe have increased year-on-year. In 2018, Citizen Machinery achieved sales of more than €600 million (1,200 units), its highest ever in the European region and even more than Japan. The company claims it is now the UK market leader for sales of all bar turning automatic lathes, including sliding-head machines.

Opening the centre Keiichi Nakajima, president of Citizen Machinery Japan said: “The investment made in this new UK centre of excellence is a demonstration of Citizen Machinery’s confidence in the UK. Whereas other machine tool builders focus more on investing in emerging markets such as China and India, Citizen has always had faith in the quality of the UK engineering industry. Therefore, it was a simple decision to commit to investing in this new facility.

“The core strength of Citizen Machinery remains its use of cutting-edge technology such as our LFV (Low Frequency Vibration) function featured in many of our machines. This impressive new facility will help with the continued development of this technology, assisted by our loyal customers, the majority of whom are clustered around this area.

“The term ‘UK Centre of Excellence’ was chosen to reflect the very high skill base we have in the UK and the desire to grow our business here, whilst transferring the benefits of our expertise across Europe through our established distribution network.

“I expect this facility to improve our already exemplary customer service provision as well as to be an information centre dispensing the latest advances in machine technology to our colleagues in the rest of Europe. I urge everyone to utilise this facility to its full extent, both to increase customer satisfaction levels and to contribute to growing the economy not just of the Midlands, but of the whole of the UK.”

The X factor

The grand opening was also an opportunity for Citizen to launch a new CNC sliding-head lathe specifically targeted for the dental and medical component markets. The 12mm bar capacity Cincom L12 Type X machine has a minimum of five rear-facing endworking tool positions including driven stations as well as the addition of a Y2-axis to the X2 and Z2 movements on the counter spindle to match the three degrees of freedom on the main spindle.

[caption id="attachment_44837" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The Cincom L12[/caption]

Citizen says to obtain this level of functionality before now, an end user would have had to purchase a 16mm or even 20mm capacity lathe, unnecessarily large and expensive for the production of slender components.

The Cincom L12 Type X machine also has Citizen’s LFV chipbreaking function as an option which reduces the build up of stringy swarf which can end up entangled around the workpiece and cutting tool hampering production. The function, which can be used with static and driven tools, is especially helpful when grooving, deep drilling, machining small diameter holes, and for internal and external thread cutting.

For the gang and back toolposts a wide variety of tooling layouts is possible. The maximum number of tools that can be deployed is 38, including the ability to drill angled holes.

Additionally, the Cincom L12 Type X model has a built-in 12,000rpm motor that drives the counter spindle, reducing acceleration and deceleration times for higher productivity. Rapid traverse in all axes of 35m/minute contributes further to minimising idle times. The new machine is also wider, providing better access to the working area. Rigidity is a result of its 2.2 tonne installed weight and it offers a compact footprint of just 1.84m by 0.97m.

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Citizen Machinery UK www.citizenmachinery.co.uk