In October 2024, I attended the 21st ICOSPA – International Council of Sheetmetal Presswork Association – conference in Osaka, Japan. ICOSPA is supported by a group of organizations working together to promote sheet metal forming in their respective countries – including the Precision Metal-forming Association in the United States. Other countries represented included: Germany, France, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and China.
Enroute thru Tokyo and Kyoto, I was able to eat some great food, tour some temples and shrines, catch a baseball game and travel via various trains and the bullet trains (Shinkansen) and gain some insight into Japanese people and society. The experiences of this trip were amazing. I found the cities I visited to be clean, the people polite, and their public transportation both reasonably priced and effective.
Prior to the conference, I met with Mitsubishi Electric, the manufacturer of Mitsubishi Lasers, to view their newest 5-axis fiber laser cutting machine and tour the laser production floor.
Church Metal Spinning has utilized Mitsubishi lasers to help manufacture parts for our Customers since 1994 when we bought our first machine, a 1212 HC 4×4 laser. We used the machine to make blanks and trim spun parts. Over the years we have had several other machines, working in close partnership with Advanced Manufacturing Systems and MC Machinery. We now have four Mitsubishi lasers including a GX fiber laser, a CO2 flat hybrid and two CO2 5-axis cutting machines.
In addition to the conference, ICOSPA attendees toured several manufacturing facilities. My group visited a family-owned manufacturing company named Sengoku and a Kawasaki Ninja production line.
The tours of Japanese manufacturing plants were interesting on two counts – first, how focused and effective the staff appeared, and how labor dependent the assembly processes were at both facilities. and how the facilities relied on a strong team approach for efficiency. The systems were definitely in place to help labor succeed, but the quality and effectiveness of the process was dependent on all doing their jobs properly.
Sengoku, founded in 1953, is privately owned and located in Kasai, Japan (about 2 hours outside Osaka). It has a multi-floor manufacturing facility with metal fabrication, painting, stamping and graphite heating element production. This facility manufactures consumer products for heating and cooking, through the use of their patented graphite heating elements encased in glass tubes. The production line for the graphite heating element is dependent on human labor for moving, inspecting and packaging the heating elements. The fabrication and stamping areas also are relatively old school – simple, but effective. The Company private labels several of the cooking devices for major Japanese and international companies. {Sengoku}
Kawasaki, located in Akashi, Japan (about an hour outside Osaka) has a large footprint and makes several different products. We toured the Ninja motorcycle plant. It was surprising that the dedicated production lines appear to be much the same as they were decades ago. I guess if it’s not broke, don’t fix it! This facility is orderly with well-established production lines that still result in excellent products today. All the components were staged along the line (e.g., frame, engine, wire harness), a carriage moves manually thru the line while the cycle is methodically pieced together. All the tools required hand over head in sequence, and one by one they are pieced together until the end of the line at which point they are started up and driven to the nearby dynometer for testing. Simple, but effective.
The trip was a good reminder that metal forming and manufacturing is a worldwide market. The production of high-quality goods and services is a combination of capital investments coupled with human commitment and ingenuity. While we compete with each other, we can also serve each other with high quality manufactured machinery, components and parts.
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