Kimball Electronics was founded in 1961 and was incorporated in 1998. We are
a global provider of contract electronic manufacturing services, including engineering
and supply chain support, to customers in the automotive, medical, industrial,
and public safety end markets. We offer a package of value that begins with
our core competency of producing “durable electronics” and have
expanded into diversified contract manufacturing services for non-electronic
components, medical disposables, plastics, and metal fabrication. This package
of value includes our set of robust processes and procedures that help us ensure
that we deliver the highest levels of quality, reliability, and service throughout
the entire life cycle of our customers’ products. We believe our customers
appreciate our body of knowledge as it relates to the design and manufacture
of their products that require durability, reliability, the highest levels of
quality control, and regulatory compliance. We deliver award-winning service
from our highly integrated global footprint which is enabled by a largely common
operating system, a standardization strategy, global procedures, and teamwork.
Our Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) model is key to providing
our customers convenient access to our global footprint and all of our services
throughout the entire product life cycle, making us easy to do business with.
Because our customers are in businesses where engineering changes must be tightly
controlled and long product life cycles are common, our track record of quality,
financial stability, social responsibility, and commitment to long-term relationships
is important to them.
We have been producing safety critical electronic assemblies for our automotive
customers for over 30 years. During this time, we have built up a body of knowledge
that has not only proven to be valuable to our automotive customers, but to
our medical, industrial, and public safety customers as well. We have been successful
in growing and diversifying our business by leveraging our automotive experience
and know-how in the areas of design and process validation, traceability, process
and change control, and lean manufacturing to create valuable and innovative
solutions for new customers in the medical, industrial, and public safety end
market verticals. These solutions include diversified contract manufacturing
services as we now offer our customers design engineering and manufacturing
expertise in precision metals and plastics. We have harmonized our quality systems
to be compliant with various important industry certifications and regulatory
requirements. This allows us to take advantage of other strategic points of
leverage in the supply chain and within our operations so we can cost-effectively
manufacture electronic and non-electronic products in the same production facility
for customers from all four of our end market verticals.
Many of our customers are multinational companies that sell their products
in multiple regions of the world. For these customers, it is important for them
to be able to leverage their investment in their supply partner relationships
such that the same partner provides them with engineering, manufacturing, and
supply chain support in multiple regions of the world. It is common for us to
manufacture the same product for the same customer in multiple locations. Our
strategy for expanding our global footprint has aligned us with the preferences
of the customers in our four end market verticals and has positioned us well
to support their global growth initiatives. Our global systems, procedures,
processes, and teamwork combined with our CRM model have allowed us to accomplish
this goal for many of our largest customers.
Our global processes and central functions that support component sourcing,
procurement, quoting, and customer pricing provide commonality and consistency
among the various regions in which we operate. We have a central, global sourcing
organization that utilizes procurement processes and practices to help secure
sources from around the world and to ensure sufficient availability of components
and a uniform approach to pricing while leveraging the purchase volume of the
entire organization. Customer pricing for all of the products we produce is
managed centrally utilizing a standardized quoting model regardless of where
our customers request their products to be produced.
Our CRM model combines members of our team from within our manufacturing facilities
and members of our business development team who reside remotely and nearer
to our customers around the world. We also have cross functional teams in the
areas of quality, operational excellence, quoting, and design engineering with
representatives from our various locations that provide support to our teams
on a global basis. The skill sets of these team members and the clarity in their
roles and responsibilities help provide our customers with a strong conduit
that is critical to execution and forming a strong relationship. We have institutionalized
a customer scorecard process that provides all levels of our company with valuable
feedback that helps us drive the actions for continuous improvement. Our customer
scorecard process has helped us deliver award-winning service and build loyalty
with our customers.