LEMO provides precision custom connections for applications that include medical technology, test and measurement and video.

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As a provider of precision custom connections for applications including medical technology, test and measurement, audio, broadcast, industrial, automation, energy and military equipment, LEMO understands the value of connections. The company’s connectors are used to supply power and keep information flowing, but those aren’t the only essential connections the company makes. According to Managing Director Tim Hassett, LEMO’s connections to its customers are just as important as the connections it makes possible for their equipment.

“We strive to see the business through the eyes of the customer,” Hassett says. In recent years, the company has changed its strategy to target larger customers directly and bring on large distributors to provide rapid delivery of product solutions and local service to the up and coming customers. Hassett says LEMO has made a customer-centric focus the basis of its corporate culture.

Hassett adds that LEMO strives to reach at least 98.5 percent satisfaction with its customers and its employees, and the reason for that is simple. “Happy employees make great products, and happy customers keep ordering those products,” he says. When dealing with customers, the company emphasizes its total cooperation with them to create a product that fits its intended use perfectly.

LEMO was founded in Switzerland in 1946, originally focused on manufacturing contacts made of noble and rare metals. The company experienced its breakthrough in 1957, when it invented the original push-pull self-latching connector system, which led to growth throughout Europe and into the United States in 1967. Since that time, the company has developed more than 60,000 products used in applications as diverse as satellites and dental tools.

Leading With Quality
LEMO’s entire operation is oriented around the concept of serving the customer better than any other manufacturer, Hassett says. The company stresses its direct involvement with customers to develop the products that will fit their needs as one of the cornerstones of this strategy.

“We’re innovators, and flexible innovators,” Hassett says. “We will design to a customer’s specific CTQs [critical to quality].”

LEMO will literally start from scratch for a customer, and Hassett says the company develops roughly 20 clean-sheet products each year. Overall, LEMO introduces about 150 new products every year, whether developed from the ground up or based on existing products.

One of the main reasons LEMO can offer this type of innovation is because the company’s ownership has empowered its global subsidiaries to develop their own ideas to better serve their customers.

Hassett says LEMO’s is a culture where every employee is encouraged to submit ideas. “Whether it’s from the person in the shop or whether it’s from myself, you look for the best ideas,” he says. “You’ve got a lot of free thinking that goes on around here.”

Once the best ideas are found, LEMO is structured to bring them off the drawing board and into customers’ hands as soon as possible, and quality of the product and meeting customers’ expectations is always No. 1. Hassett says LEMO is one of the few remaining vertically integrated manufacturers left in the industry, and it outsources very little.

This gives the company complete control over every step in the manufacturing process and ensures that customers get exactly what they need. “We control our designs, we control our tooling, we control our patterns, we do all of that in-house,” Hassett says.

This vertical integration is made possible because LEMO chooses to innovate and automate rather than outsource, Hassett says. The company is not afraid to commit to the long-term by spending on capital improvements. For certain customers, such as healthcare manufacturers, the process for developing a new product can be long due to the amount of time it takes to meet regulatory product safety standards.

“You have to balance your short-term metrics to meet your long-term strategy,” Hassett says, but that suits LEMO perfectly. “Being a privately held company, our ownership ensures that we are always planning and investing far in advance to ensure the future of the company.”

LEMO knows its customers choose the company’s products not because they’re the lowest price. Rather, they come to LEMO because of its quality, willingness to anticipate and innovate, customer service as well as working with customers to take total cost out of the supply chain, instead of the transfer to cost. “We don’t lead with price,” Hassett says.

LEMO’s focus for the future is on improving those attributes, along with the speed with which the company can provide solutions to its customers.

“The biggest challenges we have today are how to keep our lead times intact, drive innovative total cost out solutions and maintain the growth that we have,” Hassett says.