Methods’ CoE Builds Hands-On Foundation for Customer Success

Customers deserve the same high level of care no matter where they’re located or which technology they’re using. This aim lies at the heart of Methods Machine Tools’ Chicago Center of Excellence, which celebrated its grand opening on April 9^th, 2026. The Center of Excellence, located inside the company’s Gilberts, Illinois, office, is part of a new initiative within the company to achieve consistent service across its locations while also providing a way for job shop staff to familiarize themselves with new technologies that can take on complex manufacturing tasks.

“We want people to consider us for their toughest jobs,” says Dale Hedberg, Methods’ COO. As part of this, he says the company prides itself on its commitments to training, service and aftermarket care, all of which help equip its customers with the resources for difficult applications. Image courtesy of Methods Machine Tools.

A Commitment to Consistency

Methods’ Center of Excellence is meant to be a live teaching area, says Jacob Krotz, the Center’s manager. Rather than a traditional classroom space, Methods means to upskill employees and customers alike through hands-on training with machine tools and the automation systems paired with them. This training will include installation instructions and recommended standardizations to make preventative maintenance simpler, as well as directions on how to perform preventative maintenance.

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The Methods Center of Excellence is the center of the company’s strategy for standardizing its ability to support shops nationwide. By maintaining a hands-on training hub, it can ensure its technicians have a common background on how to care for current and legacy machines.

Methods also plans to use the space to train its service technicians on more general service needs across its lineup of both current machines and legacy builds. Krotz sees the latter as a vital skill as longtime customers can still use machines that might be thirty years old, and which bear aging parts that require more frequent maintenance. This training is doubly important as machine maintenance experts reach retirement age and the art of machine repair risks becoming endangered domestically. While international OEMs of the machine tools Methods distributes infrequently send service technicians to aid in maintenance, the Center of Excellence initiative is meant to ensure Methods can continue to provide most of its service through local employees.

The Center is also planned to showcase the modern side of manufacturing to new generations of potential machinists, as the Center’s first Student Day for local technical schools occurred on April 10^th. Like with training, Methods aims to develop a robust recruitment pitch that it can deploy through programs and offerings across all its offices. “I would say probably 70, 80% of the manufacturing facilities you go into are very nice, neat, clean, bright,” Krotz says, and he hopes the Center will demonstrate this to tech school instructors and their students.

Multitasking machine demand has significantly grown over the last few years, says Jon Star, Methods’ director of marketing. He credits this to the machines’ ability to include more processes in one build and automate them.

Training for Today’s Needs

Part of how Krotz intends to do this is through an emphasis on Methods’ newest machine tools and other technologies. This includes multi-tasking machines, such as the Nakamura-Tome NTY³-100V and NT-Flex that the company launched last year and which occupy places on the Center’s floor. It also includes the Methods Sidekick, a cobot Jon Star, Methods’ director of marketing, says focuses on ease-of-use to the point where someone who has never worked with a robot could learn to use it in a single day.

Methods is also demonstrating its sibling company Multiaxis’ AI-based machine monitoring platform, Multiaxis Intelligence for iOS (iMI Series). This platform currently consists of three iOS apps, iMI: Inference, iMI: Link and iMI: Lens. The first is a general-purpose manufacturing assistant enabling users to ask questions about G-code, feeds and speeds, tool paths, and other machining topics, using their own documents as a basis. The iMI: Link app is a machine monitoring app tied to FANUC controls (which many of Methods’ machines use). Lastly, iMI: Lens is a marketing tool that generates marketing images of machine tools and parts based on user photos, then generates social media posts based on those images.

Mike Kaminski, CEO of Multiaxis, calls this line of software “Methods in a pocket,” and says that it is meant to be as secure as possible. Data lives on user devices, and only relevant snippets are sent through OpenAI’s backend APIs, with no data saved about the user. Kaminski says this approach helps with data privacy requirements, and iMI: Link’s local-network default for obtaining machine information should make it compliant with ITAR requirements.

Methods Machine Tools has existed since 1958 and has provided automation since 1998. The company plans to continue growing by investing in more automation options, as well as multitasking and five-axis machines.

Windows to a Wider Market

The ribbon-cutting event also gave Methods a chance to introduce some of the partner companies whose equipment is in use at the Center. This includes Emuge-Franken tooling, with Methods pairing a skiving tool with a FANUC machine tool, as well as workholding from HWR Workholding, Royal Products and Kurt Workholding.

In all cases, the Center will provide training opportunities for Methods’ staff and that of its customers to work with these technologies in addition to machine tools, automation and software. Already, a customer team has benefited from the Center’s promise, as a maintenance team from a Pennsylvania shop arrived before the grand opening to learn how to install their new RoboCut and perform the preventative maintenance to keep it running smoothly long into the future.