Mazak strengthens UK sales structure by creating new engineering roles

Yamazaki Mazak has strengthened its UK sales organisation by creating a series of new roles aimed at increasing customer touch points and expanding time-served engineering expertise, while further enhancing its aftersales and service support offer.

As part of the move, the company has hired two new Area Sales Engineers for the Midlands. Joe Green (photo, right) will cover the West Midlands region, while Ryan Lakin (photo, left) will offer support to customers in the East Midlands. Both will report into Brian Edmondson (photo, centre), General Sales Manager for the North of England and Midlands regions.

Joe Green assumes the role having joined Mazak as an apprentice in 2017, before completing a three-year extended diploma in advanced manufacturing and engineering. Over the past eight years, he has worked in numerous roles at Mazak’s European Manufacturing Plant in Worcester, including as CNC Engineer and Production Team Lead on both the prismatic line and the turning and grinding line. Most recently, he was Machine Supervisor for two years, before moving to the Area Sales Engineer role.

Ryan Lakin also began his career as an apprentice, working for a Devon-based aerospace engineering company, before relocating to the Midlands as an applications engineer specialising in grinding and five-axis machining. Prior to joining Mazak, he most recently worked as a pre-sales engineer for a machine tool manufacturer.

The creation of the new roles follows Mazak’s recent announcement to recruit 19 new apprentices at its Worcester facility. The company is also recruiting several new service apprentices located in parts of the country with high concentrations of Mazak users.

Alan Mucklow, Managing Director UK & National Distributors at Yamazaki Mazak, says: “The creation of the Area Sales Engineer role enables us to increase our customer touch points while also providing a fresh injection of time-served engineering expertise. Both Joe and Ryan have extensive experience of working on the shop floor and will bring a complementary perspective to our established and highly skilled UK sales team.”

He continues: “Over the coming months, we’ll also expand the service apprentice roles into different geographies as we continue to make significant investment in our customer support infrastructure, which also includes our application engineering and project management teams, as well as our 108-strong service and support team.

“As a UK manufacturer ourselves, we understand many of the pressures our customers are facing. However, we remain committed to increasing the level of support we can offer – both through our service personnel, as well as our Mazak iCONNECT high-value machine insights portal.”