OM Digital Solutions Opens Okaya Lens Plant as Pilot Factory

OM Digital Solutions opened its first optical lens manufacturing site in Japan in 2025, in Nagano Prefecture, and the facility carries a specific business role: it produces small-quantity, many-type lenses and serves as a pilot factory where production processes for technically demanding new lenses are proven before mass manufacturing begins at the company's factory in Vietnam.

The site, known as the Okaya Manufacturing Site, works directly with the optical design team at OM Digital Solutions' headquarters in Hachioji, Tokyo. The company behind the OM SYSTEM brand separates two disciplines that call for different expertise: designing a lens and figuring out how to build it. Okaya's engineers handle the second task, turning a design into a production process that actually works.

Why Japan verifies what Vietnam builds

The division of labor is deliberate. Before a production line for a new lens launches in Vietnam, Okaya verifies the production technology, the manufacturing processes, and the work methods the line will use. Working those out in Japan first is intended to make Vietnamese production more efficient and keep quality consistent.

The relationship continues after production starts. If an issue surfaces while a mass-production process is verified in Vietnam, the Okaya team can reproduce that same issue on purpose. Recreating it gives engineers a controlled way to analyze what went wrong, trace the root cause, and develop a fix. Each round of back-and-forth converts specialized know-how into a repeatable process the factory can execute at the same quality, lens after lens.

What the manufacturing sequence looks like

The process starts with an individual lens element, one piece of glass inside a camera lens. OM SYSTEM's M.Zuiko Digital ED 40-150mm F2.8 PRO contains 16 of these elements. Each one needs the correct curve and a smooth surface before assembly.

A visitor trying lens polishing at an Okaya workshop chipped a lens after a slight setup mistake, a demonstration of how delicate the operation is. The sequence runs in stages:

• Grinding gradually wears down the glass to form the basic curve.
• Finer grinding makes smaller adjustments.
• Polishing removes more material to reach the smoothness and accuracy the surface needs.
• Centering corrects any mismatch between the element and its holder before assembly, so the curved faces that bend light sit exactly on-axis.

The tolerance stakes are concrete. Glass can look clear to the naked eye and still carry tiny scratches, bumps, or dips that scatter light, causing flare (the haze or bright spots stray light leaves in a picture) and lowering contrast so the image looks flatter. Polishing has two jobs: leave the surface scratch-free and reproduce the designed shape to within nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Engineers verify the glass with measuring instruments, but they also rely on experience and skill for delicate adjustments to each element. Even slight differences between individual lenses can change how light travels through the finished lens and affect image quality.

Hand-prepared tools and an apprenticeship model

Even the tools need tools. The parts fitted to grinding and polishing machines require smooth, accurately made surfaces of their own. To prepare one small, round tool face that touches the glass, an engineer holds a disc on the end of a handle against it and polishes the two surfaces together. The accuracy of the tool determines the accuracy of the surface it produces on the glass. Some of this preparation is still done by hand.

Skill transfer at Okaya follows an apprenticeship model, with coaching taking place during manufacturing work such as polishing. Veteran engineers work alongside younger colleagues, and OM Digital Solutions says the younger engineers' questions push the veterans to keep improving their own skills. The company acknowledges a structural challenge: much of the knowledge comes from experience and is difficult to put into written instructions. With its younger engineers in mind, it is exploring other ways to pass on skills and judgment that resist documentation, and it also wants experienced engineers to hand down their way of thinking about the work, not just the manual steps.

Where the strategy points

Okaya also functions as a test bed. Engineers there test early versions of lens components for new products and check new manufacturing methods for suitability at larger volumes. Once a method passes, it transfers to Vietnam. The company is automating repetitive tasks, such as loading parts into machines and removing them, to improve production quality and efficiency.

For working photographers, the Okaya model is essentially a quality-control argument: unit-to-unit consistency in a lens line depends on manufacturing processes that have been verified, debugged, and made repeatable before scale production begins. As OM Digital Solutions adds new optically demanding lenses, expect the Okaya pilot stage to remain the gate through which those designs pass on their way to volume manufacturing in Vietnam.