by Ron Mager, Machinery Systems, Inc. President & COO

From a personal perspective, the last three months have been hectic to say the least.  Two days after Christmas my wife, Joyce was diagnosed with Cancer.  After extensive surgery and a six-week recovery, Joyce is cancer-free and back to normal.  For those who have not gone through something like this, take my word for it, it’s definitely a very scary and trying experience.  I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone at MSI, Mazak and within the industry for their concern, support and kind wishes.

Since Joyce was going to be stuck at home recovering, we figured: hey, what a great time to have our kitchen remodeled!  Good thinking, huh?  What a mess!  If you have never been through something like this, here’s something to think about: we had to shop for 57 different things.  I am not making this up!   The Contractor said it would be done “in about four weeks”.  They finished just one day short of eight weeks - about what we expected.

Okay, enough about me.

What’s happening at MSI?
Here at MSI, we just concluded our annual March Open House.  Actually it’s Mazak’s Open House for the entire Midwest Region and the theme this year was “Mazak Solution Days”.  However, since it’s only a couple of blocks away from MSI headquarters and it’s attended by more of our customers and prospects than any other of the distributors in the Midwest, we tend to look at it as our own.

Although I don’t have data to prove it, I submit that this was our best attendance in the last decade.  I had more fun then ever as I saw many customers whom I have come to know well and spent some time getting to know others better.  Without exception, everyone’s business is doing pretty well.

So I would like to extend some thanks:

·         To those customers and potential customers who took time out of their schedules to see the latest and greatest technology in the machine tool industry;

·         To our salesmen and telemarketer for their extraordinary effort both convincing people to come to the show and making sure those that came were taken care of they way they should be;

·         To the Mazak folks at the Midwest Regional Tech Center for their hard work in pulling it all together; and

·         For the extra support during the show from the folks from Mazak, KY.  This presence was a tremendous help in making the show the event the success it was.

How about the market?
From my perspective the market has changed a bit compared to six- to nine-months ago.  At that time, many of our Orders (and those we lost) I would describe as “capacity buys.”  It wasn’t necessarily about which machine tool was the best for the application or the most productive.  Many times, it wasn’t about price either.  Instead it was about who had a machine tool in stock or who’s delivery was the shortest.  Sometimes we got lucky here and sometimes we didn’t.

Now (especially at the Open House) I have begun to see a lot more of what I will call “productivity buys”.  Customers and potential customers have enough capacity now to keep their heads above water and are starting to say to them “okay, now it’s time for us to look at how we can be more productive”.

What does that mean to us?  Probably a different Mazak product mix.  Perhaps a longer and more-involved sales process – more analysis, cost justification, test-cutting, etc.  And most importantly, an opportunity to do what we do best: help our customers solve their shop floor problems.

By the way, I am sticking with my forecast of a 5% to 10% increase in our industry in 2007. 

Final Note
In my inaugural column in the last MS”eye”Watch I promised I would try to make this one a little shorter.  I would like to point out that there is a 35% reduction in word count this time compared to the last column.  So there ya go…

Final Final Note
I welcome your feedback!

Copyright © 1997 Machinery Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Headquarters: 614 E. State Parkway; Schaumburg, IL 60173  847.882.8085   Fax 847.882.2894
Revised: May 31, 2007.