Technical History
Yamazaki Mazak, DMG Mori, Okuma, Doosan, and Miyano each arrived at the multi-axis turn-mill, more commonly called a multitasking machine or mill-turn center, from very different starting points — a Nagoya cookware maker, a German-Japanese merger of watch-era lathe and milling houses, a noodle-machine manufacturer that taught itself precision engineering from scratch, a Korean state machinery works that traces back to a 1937 colonial-era plant, and a Tokyo file maker that grew up alongside a watch company. Their machines combine a turning spindle with a full milling head on the same platform, letting a single setup finish parts that once required moving between a lathe and a machining center, and together these names define the segment machinists reach for when a job calls for "done in one" complete machining.
Mazak's history starts about as far from precision machining as a machine tool company's history can start. Sadakichi Yamazaki set up the business in Nagoya in 1919, and its first products had nothing to do with metalworking at all — the company began by making pots and pans. Through the 1920s the product line drifted step by step toward heavier equipment: first mat-making machinery, then woodworking machinery, and only after that metalworking machine tools, with lathes becoming the core of the business. Like most of Japan's machine tool builders, the company was pulled into the country's pre-war and wartime industrial expansion, and like the rest of that industry it came out of the Second World War in rough shape.
Recovery fell to the founder's sons, who took over during the 1950s and 1960s and rebuilt the company into a serious exporter, pushing into the American market during that same period. The 1970s and 1980s brought a deeper, more permanent American presence — not just sales offices but actual machine-building operations on US soil — and by the 1980s Mazak had also established a European manufacturing base in Worcester, England, backed by a sales and support network built out across the world. That combination of Japanese engineering, US manufacturing, and a genuinely global service footprint became one of the company's defining traits, distinguishing it from builders that stayed concentrated in a single home market for decades longer.
Mazak's specific move into multi-axis turn-mills came in the second half of the 1990s with the introduction of the INTEGREX line, a family of machines built around combining a full CNC turning center with a genuine machining center on one platform rather than simply bolting a driven-tool turret onto a standard lathe. The idea was to let a complex part — one that would otherwise need to travel between a turning department and a milling department, picking up setup error and lead time at every transfer — get finished complete in a single clamping. INTEGREX became closely enough associated with that concept that, inside Mazak's own marketing and across much of the industry, the name is now used almost as a stand-in for the multitasking machine category generally, in much the same way "Kleenex" or "Xerox" outgrew their original brand boundaries.
Mazak kept building on that platform in the decades that followed. The 2010s brought hybrid multi-tasking machines that layered additional process capability — including additive manufacturing heads on select models — onto the turning-and-milling base, alongside a broader push into what the company calls the iSMART Factory concept, connecting its machines into networked, data-driven production cells. Mazak also continued opening technology centers and parts hubs across Europe and Asia through the 2010s, reinforcing the same global support model it had built decades earlier. Today the INTEGREX family spans a wide range of sizes and configurations, from compact entry-level multitasking machines aimed at shops replacing a turret lathe's weak points with real milling capability, up through large-format machines built for aerospace structural parts, and the line remains organized around Mazak's own MAZATROL conversational control software, which is designed to generate machining programs directly from 3D CAD data rather than requiring hand-written G-code for every operation.
DMG Mori's turn-mill lineage is unusual among the major builders because it was assembled from two entirely separate national traditions that only merged in the 21st century — one German, rooted in milling, and one Japanese, rooted in turning. The German side traces back furthest: Friedrich Gildemeister, a locksmith by trade, opened a machine tool workshop in Bielefeld in 1870 that grew into a turning- and drilling-machine manufacturer over the following decades. A separate Munich firm, founded in 1903 by Friedrich Deckel and Christian Bruns, built a reputation for precision milling machines used in toolmaking and mold work, while a third German company, Maho, was founded in 1920 as Mayr, Hoermann & Cie. These three German lines came together only gradually and much later: Deckel and Maho merged in 1993, and in 1994 Gildemeister absorbed the merged Deckel Maho operation, taking on the combined name Deckel Maho Gildemeister — the origin of the "DMG" that still labels part of the brand today.
The Japanese side of the company has a shorter but equally distinct history. Mori Seiki was founded in 1948 in Yamato-Koriyama, in Nara Prefecture, by three brothers surnamed Mori, and it started out making textile machinery rather than metalworking equipment — a common path for Japanese manufacturers rebuilding in the years immediately after the war. The pivot to machine tools came in 1958, when Mori Seiki began producing high-speed precision lathes, setting the company on the turning-focused engineering path that would define it for the rest of the century. Mori Seiki grew that lathe business steadily through the second half of the 20th century and added to it through acquisition, picking up grinding-machine maker Taiyo Koki in 2001 and taking on Hitachi Seiki's machine tool business the following year.
The two companies' paths finally crossed in 2008 and 2009, when Mori Seiki and Gildemeister AG entered a strategic partnership that grew into a formal capital and business alliance, each side taking a small stake in the other as a first step toward closer cooperation. That relationship deepened steadily rather than all at once: by 2013 the two companies felt confident enough in the arrangement to unify under a single "DMG MORI" brand worldwide, with Gildemeister renamed DMG Mori Seiki Aktiengesellschaft and Mori Seiki renamed DMG Mori Seiki Co., Ltd., and a jointly held holding company set up to coordinate the two organizations. Full ownership consolidation took a few more years to complete — DMG Mori Co., Ltd. built its stake in the German company up past 52 percent in 2015 and past three-quarters by 2016 — but by the time that process wrapped up, the group was operating as a single global company under the simplified DMG Mori name, combining German milling engineering with Japanese turning engineering under one roof for the first time.
On the product side, that combined heritage shows up directly in the turn-mill lineup. The CTX and NLX lathe families carry forward the turning-focused engineering Mori Seiki built its reputation on, while the NTX series is built specifically as a mill-turn platform, integrating a turning spindle with simultaneous 5-axis milling so that a workpiece can be machined complete on all six sides in a single clamping rather than being repositioned between operations. DMG Mori has layered further specialized process technology onto that base over the years as well, including ultrasonic-assisted machining for hard, brittle materials and laser deposition and texturing technology under its LASERTEC brand, both aimed at the same underlying goal the merger itself was built around — folding more of a part's manufacturing process into fewer machines and fewer setups.
Okuma is the oldest of the three companies in this history by a wide margin, and, like Mazak, it started nowhere near metalworking. Eiichi Okuma founded the business in Nagoya in 1898 as the Okuma Noodle Machine Co., building machines to make udon noodles — an origin the company still points to today. The connection to machine tools came through a surprisingly direct route: producing the noodle-cutting "sticks" required a lathe, and Eiichi Okuma found the lathes available on the Japanese market at the time weren't precise enough for the job, which pushed him toward building his own equipment. That problem-first, build-it-yourself pattern shows up again and again across this industry's early history, and Okuma's version of it dates back further than any other company covered here.
Machine tool manufacturing became a formal part of the business in 1904, and it grew quickly from there. Okuma secured its first machine tool patent in 1914 for an automatic gear-cutting lathe, and in 1918 the company renamed itself Okuma Machinery Works Ltd. and launched its OS center lathe, which went on to sell roughly 2,000 units over the next 25 years. By 1937, Okuma had become the largest domestic producer of machine tools in Japan. Its next major hit came after the war: the LS high-speed engine lathe, introduced in 1958, eventually sold around 30,000 units across 40 countries and became, by the company's own account, its best-selling product ever.
Okuma's control-system work is what set it apart from most of its competitors over the following decades, and it's directly relevant to how the MULTUS turn-mill line eventually came together. Research into numerical control began in 1961, leading to the OSP III control with absolute position feedback in 1963 and, in 1967, the LA40-N — the company's first mass-produced NC lathe. The bigger leap came in 1972 with the OSP 2000, a genuinely computerized CNC with a built-in computer that the company markets as an early practical CNC system, one that stayed in production for more than seven years. Okuma renamed itself Okuma Corporation in 1991, adopting the corporate identity it still uses today, and continued building out both its machine lineup and its in-house control technology through the 1990s rather than turning to outside CNC suppliers the way most competitors did.
That in-house-everything approach — hardware, software, and controls all designed under one roof, which Okuma calls its "Single Source" philosophy — became the foundation for the company's turn-mill line. The MULTUS series launched in 2004 with the B300 model, notable not just as Okuma's entry into multitasking machining but as the first Okuma machine equipped with the company's Collision Avoidance System, one of a series of in-house "Intelligent Technologies" built to catch programming and setup errors before they damage a machine or a part. Okuma extended the platform further in 2016 with its LASER EX series, super-multitasking machines — including the MULTUS U3000 LASER EX — that add laser processing capability on top of turning and milling, aimed at shops that want to go from raw material to a finished part on a single machine without ever moving the workpiece.
Of the manufacturers in this history, Doosan's lineage runs through the roughest stretch of 20th-century industrial history and the most corporate name changes. Its machine-building roots go back to 1937, when a plant called Chosun Machine Works was set up in Incheon under Japanese colonial administration, building diesel engines and, during the Pacific War, naval equipment. After Korea's liberation in 1945 the plant passed through government hands, and in 1963 it was reorganized as a state-run enterprise under the name Korea Machinery Industries Corp., becoming one of the country's earliest producers of diesel engines, forklifts, and rolling stock as part of Korea's postwar industrial buildout. In 1976 the business was acquired by the Daewoo conglomerate and renamed Daewoo Heavy Industries, and a dedicated machine tool factory followed the next year, putting metal-cutting machine tools on the same industrial footing as the company's engines and construction equipment.
Daewoo Heavy Industries' machine tool business grew substantially over the following two decades. Production of the PUMA lathe series began in 1980, and by the 1990s the company was opening overseas manufacturing and sales operations in Europe, China, and beyond, building the kind of international distribution network that its Japanese rivals had established a decade or two earlier. The 1997–98 Asian financial crisis hit the wider Daewoo Group hard, and its machinery operations were spun off as an independent business, Daewoo Heavy Industries & Machinery, in 1999, separating the machine tool line from the rest of the collapsing conglomerate. That separation set the stage for new ownership: in 2005, the Doosan Group — a much older conglomerate with roots of its own stretching back to a small Seoul retail shop opened in 1896 — acquired the business and renamed it Doosan Infracore, folding machine tools into a broader portfolio that also included construction equipment and diesel engines.
Under Doosan, the PUMA line's turn-mill capability expanded considerably, adding Y-axis milling, sub-spindles, and twin-turret configurations aimed squarely at finishing complex parts in one setup rather than sending them to a separate milling operation. The company recognized this shift itself: a multi-tasking turning center was named one of Korea's top new technologies of the year around 2004, right as the Doosan-era rebuild of the business was getting underway. Investment continued through the 2010s, including a large-capacity manufacturing plant at Seongju completed in 2013 and Red Dot Design Award wins for the PUMA SMX and FM/5AX lines in 2014 and 2015. In 2016 the machine tool business was carved out again, renamed Doosan Machine Tools Co., Ltd., and sold to the private equity firm MBK Partners, before changing hands once more in 2021, when automotive parts group DN Automotive acquired the company and rebranded it DN Solutions — the name the business operates under today, even though its turn-mill machines are still widely known by the PUMA name the line has carried since 1980.
Miyano's origin story runs parallel to Mazak's and Okuma's in one respect — it also started nowhere near machine tools — but its particular starting point was smaller and quieter than either. Toshimori Miyano founded the company in Kameido, Tokyo, in 1929, and its first products were industrial precision files, hand tools used for the fine shaping and finishing of metal parts rather than machines that did that shaping automatically. That changed in 1948, when Miyano developed Japan's first automatic cam-operated lathe, a machine that used mechanical cams rather than a human operator to control the cutting tool's motion through a repeating cycle — the same basic principle, mechanized decades earlier, that CNC controls would later replace with digital motion commands.
From that first automatic lathe, Miyano built a reputation over the following decades around fixed-headstock CNC lathes rather than the sliding-headstock Swiss-type machines associated with some of its Japanese peers, along with automatic chuckers and, eventually, CNC turn-mill machines with dual-spindle and dual-turret configurations. The company leaned heavily on old-fashioned manufacturing craftsmanship even as its machines grew more electronically sophisticated — hand-scraped slideways, thick-walled high-rigidity spindles, and machine beds built as heavy, stable platforms — with the specific goal of holding accuracy over years of hard production use rather than chasing the fastest possible cycle time. That combination of high rigidity and long-term accuracy retention became Miyano's calling card in medium-sized precision parts work, particularly for automotive components, construction machinery, and hydraulic equipment.
Miyano's path eventually intersected with a much larger name in Japanese precision manufacturing: Citizen. Citizen Watch Co. had been producing its own machine tools since 1936, built originally to manufacture watch components to the tolerances its watchmaking business demanded, and that internal toolmaking arm grew into Citizen Machinery, known for its CINCOM line of Swiss-type sliding-headstock CNC lathes. In January 2011, Citizen Machinery and Miyano Machinery merged, combining Citizen's sliding-headstock CINCOM lathes with Miyano's fixed-headstock turning and turn-mill machines under one roof as Citizen Machinery Miyano Co., Ltd. The combined company shipped its 100,000th automatic lathe in 2014, and in 2015 it simplified its corporate name to Citizen Machinery Co., Ltd., with Miyano continuing on as a product line and brand within that company rather than as a separate business — its dual-spindle, dual-turret turn-mill machines still sold and supported today under the Miyano name.
Placed side by side, Mazak, DMG Mori, Okuma, Doosan, and Miyano reached the multi-axis turn-mill by five genuinely different roads. Mazak, Okuma, and Miyano share an odd structural similarity: none of them started anywhere near metalworking, with Mazak beginning as a cookware manufacturer, Okuma as a noodle-machine builder, and Miyano as a maker of hand files, and each only backed into precision machine tools because the equipment available to them wasn't accurate enough — or didn't exist at all — for what they were actually trying to make. From there, though, their paths diverge sharply. Mazak grew into a broad, internationally manufactured machine tool line and used its INTEGREX brand, launched in the late 1990s, to essentially define the modern multitasking machine category in the eyes of much of the industry. Okuma took a narrower, more self-contained route, spending decades building its own NC and CNC controls in-house under a "Single Source" philosophy before finally applying that control expertise to its own turn-mill line, MULTUS, in 2004. Miyano stayed smaller and more specialized still, building its reputation on fixed-headstock rigidity and hand-scraped precision before merging into the much larger Citizen Machinery in 2011, where its turn-mill machines live on as a product brand rather than an independent company.
DMG Mori and Doosan, meanwhile, both arrived at their turn-mill lines through consolidation rather than organic growth, though from very different directions. DMG Mori was assembled from the outside in, merging a German lineage built on milling — Gildemeister, Deckel, and Maho — with a Japanese lineage built on turning in Mori Seiki, a combination that didn't fully come together into one company until the 2013–2016 merger. Doosan's route ran through decades of Korean industrial and corporate upheaval instead: a machine tool business that began life as a 1937 colonial-era engine plant passed through state ownership, the Daewoo conglomerate, a financial-crisis breakup, and finally the Doosan Group's 2005 acquisition, before changing hands twice more to become today's DN Solutions — with its PUMA turn-mills carrying the connective thread through all of it. What unites all five companies, despite those different starting points, is the same underlying engineering bet: that combining a turning spindle and a full milling head on one machine, and finishing a complex part in a single clamping, beats moving that part between separate turning and milling operations. Whichever brand a shop runs — INTEGREX, NTX, MULTUS, PUMA, or a Miyano dual-spindle turn-mill — the day-to-day experience of programming a multi-axis turn-mill follows a similar logic of coordinating turning and milling operations around one workpiece, even though each manufacturer's conversational software and control dialect still differs meaningfully from the others.