4FRONT has embraced a continuous improvement initiative with the ongoing use of Lean and Six Sigma principles throughout the company. Prioritizing Lean and Six Sigma initiatives are a significant part of 4FRONT's culture and touches all of our functional departments -- Sales, Finance, Supply Chain, Operations, etc. Our dedication to these principles has enabled 4FRONT to improve manufacturing efficiency, reduce variations, defects and costs; allowing us to deliver a more reliable product in the most cost effective manner for our customers.
Lean initiatives begin at the new product introduction phase. 4FRONT prefers to be involved and provide support as early in the design phase as possible. The goal is cost avoidance - making your product easy to source, manufacture and test. We are eager to provide support for:
A critical challenge in the EMS industry is effectively dealing with small lot sizes over a wide range of customers and product types. In order to keep manufacturing costs at a minimum, EMS must improve manufacturing velocity through waste elimination. How we eliminate waste:
We value and invest in our people. We have an in-house learning center where they receive hands-on training by certified personnel for J-STD, IPC, and process specific training.
As part of our lean initiatives, we cross-train and certify all of our operators to handle several production processes. The individual skill levels are maintained and managed using an employee matrix. In order to incentivize, employee compensation is tied to the certification levels achieved. Utilizing our MES system, operators are only allowed to access work instructions for those processes for which they have been certified.