Firstronic is a premier specialty provider of electronics manufacturing services (EMS), including turnkey electronic assembly and materials management services, to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the electronics industry. Firstronic’s electronic manufacturing services consist primarily of the manufacture of complex printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs) using through-hole and surface mount technology (SMT), interconnection technologies including fine-pitch and mixed technology products.
Our Lean Operating System has been developed and implemented by a team of executives with significant automotive industry experience. Our lean approach has redesigned traditional electronics manufacturing and has resulted in high customer satisfaction ratings leading to very rapid growth in an industry that has otherwise been in decline throughout North America.
We are focused as a strong niche player in the complex EMS segments, primarily in the medical, industrial, and automotive markets. Our customers rely on our broad range of capabilities, superior customer service and highly flexible manufacturing operations specifically geared toward low-to-medium volume production.
We utilize sophisticated equipment in our manufacturing operations, which enables our team to provide synchronous flow manufacturing with a high degree of flexibility. Our Lean Operating System utilizes standardized metrics to ensure consistent performance throughout our facilities. We’ve standardized on the latest Siemens high-speed vision based SMT equipment with state-of-the-art soldering technology to reduce set-up and changeover times, which is key to efficiently producing low-to-medium volume products in a high-mix environment. Based upon this synchronous flow approach, we’ve been able to reduce order lead times to days, whereas most providers in the EMS industry require a fixed production schedule of several weeks.
Poised for Continued Growth with Existing Capacity
With our successful expansions over the last few years, we’ve proven that we have an easily scalable business model with the production capacity and management infrastructure to significantly and reliably develop new business. We have enormous potential for sales growth, given our competitive cost, quality, delivery position and available capacity. We currently operate four shifts to provide additional flexibility and capacity. Furthermore, the most capital intensive part of the business (SMT lines) are currently operating at approximately 60% of the available capacity, which is providing the company an ongoing growth opportunity with immediate availability for new and existing customer program wins. We have the capability to immediately start producing products for a new program without costly delays and has demonstrated the ability to rapidly and successfully launch many new products.
Our Philosophy of Continuous Improvement
We focus on constantly improving our business processes and systems in order to maintain our leading position in the market segments we serve. Since our management team members are significant shareholders in the Company, we have a strong motivation to continuously develop process and operational improvements. We’ve implemented a number of world-class manufacturing practices to maintain our success and improve our operations, mainly based upon the principles of Lean manufacturing. All employees, not just management, are involved in the development and implementation of process improvements.
Our global purchasing experience enables us to eliminate supply chain risks. Our procurement group has also developed extensive bonding systems for inventory controls with a particular strength in commodity management. Couple that with our in-house engineering capability that includes design, test and DFX, and cutting edge manufacturing equipment, and we can support almost any requirement you can throw at us. We are achieving industry leading performance in many metrics, including inventory turns (internally as well as for customers), on-time delivery, quality, cash conversion cycle, etc. And because of our size we have a low operational cost profile, which gives us the luxury of maintaining an agile manufacturing capability. This translates into true flexibility for you.
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