Support
Machine tool support does vary a lot depending on geographic regions. I had worked at the Mazak Northeast Tech Center for 2 weeks shy of 7 years in Applications and my objective opinion was this office did an EXCELLENT JOB with prompt and effective customer support. Being in machine tools in New England for the last 30 years, I know of a time when Mazak Northeast had a horrible reputation for both customer support, and as a good place to work. That got fixed at the time Bill Citron became GM of the office, around 2000 or so? Bill turned the office around and got a real customer driven vibe into everybody that worked there. Indeed, he even fired a guy that lied to a customer, passing off a used machine as new! Bill moved on in 2006 to become President of Mazak Laser Division in Chicago. My toast to Bill at his going away party was; "Bill, you're one of the only guys I know in your position that wasn't a complete flaming f"**king a**hole." This really endeared me to the other Mazak management attending the party.
The Integrex is an absolute beast when it comes to calibration of the coordinate system, alignments and especially correcting for the mechanical error of the B axis turret pivot point! This is not a criticism in the least, it's the nature of the beast with Integrex type machines.
The big advantage Mazak has is that they got into the Integrex style game in the mid to late 80's, and are currently on their 6th or 7th generation of Integrex, where each new version gets a lot of CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT learned from the previous models.
It takes a lot of time and experience to deal with Integrexes, and Mazak's CORPORATE MEMORY AND CAPACITY has been at the Integrexes for DECADES so they are well versed on "the nature of the beast".
Doosan is a great builder and I've worked on a lot of them in a customer support role. They are good at what they do, but simply do not have the decades of corporate memory developed in dealing with Integrex types for DECADES!
If I was buying a big ticket machine tool, the first thing I would request of all the builders under consideration is a local USERS LIST. The longer they take to produce it, means the more time they had to spend culling the good testimonial users from the disgruntled and disappointed users. I'm pretty sure Mazak Northeast would be able to produce a good users list of happy Integrex customers quicker than any other builders!
-jim
PS - Mazak USA website lists openings for THREE Field Service Techs for the northeast office. So, Northeast customer support may not be as good now as I remember from my time there? Back in late 2008 and early 2009, Mazak aggressively cut staff with layoffs and early retirements and termination incentives. I got caught in this, but I'm lazy and subversive, so I deserved to loose my job. They could not predict the future, but in hindsight it looks like they cut excessively and now have to build things back up to early 2008 levels.
