Preco Electronics (Morton, Illinois), an electronics manufacturing services (EMS) provider serving middle-market original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), announced the launch of its plan to incorporate six sigma principles throughout the company. Recently, the senior management of Preco attended a weeklong program to understand more about integrating six sigma into the company's existing lean philosophies.

While the existing lean manufacturing initiatives have eliminated waste and improved performance at the Morton facility for the past four years, six sigma provides tools to utilize process data in all areas of the business to reduce variation in execution and improve quality while reducing costs to the customer.

The unification of these philosophies will provide Preco Electronics with: an evolving framework to insure that customer critical requirements are understood and operation focus is developed to address them; a program to identify the root cause of issues and process inefficiencies and solve them permanently; and a data-driven culture based on continuous improvement.