On Wednesday I had the opportunity to enjoy dinner with one of our highly valued customers in the Pacific Northwest. As we were talking, their CTO announced that we had been successfully producing products for their company for exactly two years now. While we continued to chat about the business we have been doing together, and the journey that we have all been on over the last few years, it occurred to me that each of our values showed up in serving this important customer.

Truthfully, this was a customer with rigorous demands, whose success depended on finding an electronics manufacturer that would be willing to put them first. Our employees at the NW facility worked closely with their team and showed an outstanding amount of teamwork in order to solve all of the problems that developed through the start.

Over the last 24 months, developing an efficient and burden-free box build process for them which was also capable of delivering their products 100% on time was a our main objective. Several employees were given promotions to positions in the newly formed production cell to meet the demand. Clearly, a long term vision was necessary to produce this product, as we were continually challenged to serve their needs. Both honesty and trust were key components of our relationship, throughout the high level of complicated business issues which needed to be worked out.

As our dinner came to a close, with great satisfaction they went on to explain that we had achieved over 99.25% production quality on all shipments of their product. The only quality problems which did surface were due to a component-related issue, rather than workmanship or electronics assembly. It was a great meeting and it made me proud to know that I work with a special team of people that make great things happen for our customers. Keep serving!

Rick McClain,

Milwaukee Electronics COO

Rick Over the last couple of months the Milwaukee SMT team has been working to improve our SMT operation. The team used our new information system to learn about the area's efficiency, quality, and on time delivery. They used this information to determine the action items to make improvements and it is now showing up in their on time delivery metrics. Although we didn't create a specific kaizen event for this improvement, the team’s work clearly used lean principles. Now that we have clear metrics in this area to continue to drive improvement, I am confident that this improvement will continue. This is actually the proper definition for kaizen. Continuous Improvement. With these new metrics, the team can monitor their own progress and determine their own course of action to continually improve the operation. Congratulations to Damian Turner, Quinton Wiggins, and the rest of our SMT team for leading the way in using our new information to drive our operation to be Fast, Accurate, and Profitable.

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