As greater demand creates pressure to produce products quickly, Flex’s Hooi Tan explains how advanced manufacturing technology helps shorten time to market.

Transforming an idea into a product that helps improve the world is complicated. Doing it at scale? Even harder. From ideation to prototyping, engineering, assembly, reverse logistics, and everything in between, mass manufacturing is complex.

However, the complexity doesn’t keep demand at bay. According to the most recent United States Census Bureau data, new orders for manufactured goods through July 2021 increased again, spiking fourteen of the prior fifteen months and accounting for nearly half a trillion dollars. Similar trends span the globe, with consumer spending and interest in durable goods increasing in many countries, especially with the holidays fast approaching. It’s not just consumer demand, though. The past 18 months showed how quickly health systems could request highly regulated medical devices like ventilators and oxygenizers.

To keep up with the increasing demand, manufacturers are working harder than ever, accelerating time to market with quicker ramps, less waste, and greater efficiency. And this task becomes even more challenging for certain product categories.

While the product lifecycle for consumer goods is already short, they rapidly change year to year and sometimes even month to month. While highly regulated industries, such as medical and automotive, move slower, they are also in high demand. To address these challenges, organizations need to invest in Industry 4.0 technologies that help create smart, efficient, and sustainable factories.

As someone who manages operations for one of the world’s largest manufacturers and oversees more than 150,000 team members who help produce approximately 50,000–60,000 different products across more than 100 sites, I can attest that advanced manufacturing technology has helped us drive greater efficiency and sustainability while lowering costs during every step of the product journey. Not only do these innovations help us meet growing demand, they enable us to make data-driven decisions, improve safety on the factory floor, and reduce repetitive manual work.

Ways advanced manufacturing technology can support every facet of the product lifecycle:

Innovate and ideate

Turning a vision into a viable product requires a mix of art and science. Before moving forward, organizations need to consider design plans, production strategy, building materials, and more.

Simulation and modeling technology are two innovations that can help check for product viability and potential pitfalls during these early stages. By modeling and simulating what the product will look like in a virtual realm, organizations can save time and money instead of building it and testing it in the real world. This type of innovation can also help identify high-risk components or parts before a product even exists.

Design and develop

The next step is to shorten the time to market with a working prototype. This step requires the right mix of know-how, advanced software, and production capabilities.

Additive manufacturing solutions have become incredibly important in this leg. Instead of leveraging legacy production solutions, which often require the removal of materials through milling, carving, or other means, additive manufacturing enables engineers to quickly create a prototype leveraging CAD software or 3D object scanners. Here, 3D printing and rapid prototyping serve as an incredibly cost-effective and fast way to deliver a product in its first tangible form. In addition, the use of additive enables teams to quickly test the design before it goes into mass production, where potential errors can be detrimental.

Build and produce

Once a product is ready for primetime, the factory must be too. Ensuring a factory is leveraging the latest automation and digitization solutions can reap massive benefits in the long run.

Smart automation and robotics can help streamline repetitive assembly tasks, reduce variability and possibility for error while increasing safety, and freeing up human workers for more valuable work. These machines can also exchange information with one another using machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to improve coordination, thereby boosting performance, lowering downtime, and raising productivity while reducing costs.

Deliver and support

With production running at full steam, organizations come to the final leg of the product journey, where the focus shifts to fulfillment, distribution, logistics, and aftermarket support. At this stage, keeping up with constantly changing dynamics, shortages, and repairs can be one of the more complex steps.

Real-time visibility into transport networks, orders, and returns becomes paramount at this stage. Therefore, a strong digitization plan is fundamental here. Leading manufacturers implement distributed digital technologies on factory floors globally to act as a 24/7 decision-making system. These systems can integrate feeds from various sources, including factory machines, supply chain feeds, and even global news media, turning insights into actions to navigate a crisis.

While this overview provides a high-level snapshot of what it takes to create a product at scale, anyone who has ever worked in a factory knows it’s not that simple. No two ramps are ever the same, and challenges can pop up on any line at any time. Industry 4.0 technologies represent a much-needed step forward that helps alleviate costly mistakes that can delay production. However, the real importance will always be the knowledge of the workers and managers on the factory floor. Technologies can free up time, increase safety, and improve decision making. Still, it’s the real-time human-level problem solving that drives the most value and ensures that deadlines are met, products are produced, and contracts are fulfilled.

In future blogs, I’ll write about the innovations and people that drive manufacturing forward.

Manufacturing firms need to respond rapidly to changing business conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic has created temporary shutdowns and supply chain challenges across industries around the globe. As sites prepare to re-open, manufacturers need to maintain business continuity and operational efficiency.

To anticipate, understand, and respond to changing production levels at our sites, we use Industry 4.0 innovations such as machine-to-machine communications (M2M), smart automation, and business intelligence. Another digital manufacturing innovation is remote-enabled technology made possible by a combination of Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and real-time analytics. These tools provide insights that help us get back to normal production levels.

Here’s how we used remote-enabled technology for advanced manufacturing to improve operational efficiency during a mandated lockdown in Shanghai — and positioned our teams for success as the site re-opened.

Cloud for manufacturing resiliency

Even before the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in remote-enabled technology tools for manufacturing was on the rise. MarketWatch estimates that the global cloud manufacturing market will continue to increase at a CAGR of nearly 20% over the next four years.

We had taken proactive measures prior to the pandemic to move more of our information technology and manufacturing operations systems to the cloud. So when the Shanghai factory shut down in February 2020, employees still retained full access to critical systems — even while working remotely.

Developing and deploying infrastructure 

When the shutdown began in Shanghai, we notified employees and confirmed their safety. Then we immediately began planning for a return to production.

In partnership with Arch Systems, team members outside China continued developing the underlying technology infrastructure for a new manufacturing IoT solution. This allowed us to transition the floor from manual to automatic operations when factory employees returned to work in Shanghai.

A combination of hardware and software monitors the status of key machines and feeds data back into the Manufacturing Execution System (MES). The system automates scheduling, work in progress (WIP) tracking, order fulfillment, material backflush, and other MES features to drive fundamental efficiencies. Operational data uploads to the cloud. The digitization of this data then feeds into analytics to show key performance indicators (KPIs).

Understanding and anticipating utilization — from anywhere 

Using the tracking data to provide real-time analytics gave us an immediate sense of our progress upon reopening. Within the solution, operational data aggregates to automatically calculate KPIs like machine utilization (MU) and line utilization (LU). And since the solution is cloud-based, we can easily track productivity at our Shanghai facility from anywhere, while keeping suppliers and customers updated. The remote visibility into operations will also help us monitor the progress of other key manufacturing sites around the world.

We’re also using the automated performance data from each line to develop predictive models. These models will help us avoid unplanned downtime and optimize production schedules in the future, saving time and money.

A stronger foundation with Industry 4.0

The combination of IoT technologies, cloud, and analytics have primed manufacturing to adapt in the face of unexpected global challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to our investment in these technologies, we were able to maintain forward momentum as operations stopped and restarted at our Shanghai facility.

Not only did we save critical margin and return to full production faster than expected, but we also launched new technology that increases operational efficiency. As the pandemic response continues, we’re committed to helping our customers design, develop and deliver crucial resources to their end customers.

Despite excellent adoption rates, today’s generation of fitness trackers are leaving opportunities on the table: drop off and abandonment rates are high, and today’s consumers want more personalization. What’s the gap that wearable health technology product creators and innovators have to mind?

As tech and science news site, Futurism, notes; “while consumer industry fitness band leaders… have enough technology to document steps and pulses, they don’t have the ability to put together the bigger picture of their user’s health. Essentially, they’re not dynamic enough to be clinical-quality. And when you’re looking to track your vitals, why settle for anything short of what a doctor might use?”

Making the shift to personalized, data-driven insights

Samantha Kleinberg, Ph.D., an assistant professor of computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, notes a shift in how the data collected by wellness devices is used and shown to users, stating;

Dr. Kleinberg’s research focuses on improving human health through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). She is currently working on devices that automatically measure food intake using wearable technologies. For users with issues like diabetes, the key to improving their health is a holistic overview of that data with automated, continuous feedback. Dr. Kleinberg’s approach leverages the ability to store, retrieve, and analyze all the data pulled in by apps and off-the-shelf smartwatches and fitness trackers. The shift in demand to “why” has influenced the direction of her own work.

Fostering connections via community

We’re seeing virtual communities and virtual events playing a critical role in maximizing data value, a trend that’s echoed by others throughout the industry.

Mike Caldwell, founder and chief engineer of Pacer Health says, “A common scenario is the virtual event, where activity trackers allow their global user base to participate in online events that have sponsorships, medals, and rewards just like real offline endurance events or charity walks. Corporate wellness and insurance tie-ins are also areas to watch, with white labeling of existing products also being a commonly discussed business model.”

Gartner suggests that by the end of 2017, 70% of enterprise organizations will be sponsoring wellness-focused wearables. Not only are brands and products leveraging community data to increase engagement and success, but there are also benefits for community health trends. Right now, communities are comprised largely of people users already know, thanks to connections harvested from their social media networks. Could predictive analytics help users forge connections with wider communities that share their goals and wellness styles in a way that could further embed the experience in their lives?

A connected view of the entire person

What does all this mean for the future of health solutions devices? What kind of underlying analytics are required to feed a user’s fitness tracker, sleep monitor, calorie app, and an emotional feedback system into a single dashboard, parse that data, and circle back with recommendations?

We think it creates an important mandate for product creators to ensure that while their products deliver value alone, they also link into a system that isn’t yet fully developed. Building intelligent products is going to be less about requiring one device to deliver a holistic experience, and more about creating products that are complete in and of themselves, while also feeding into a larger wearable health technology system.

“Although smartphones are incredible supercomputers that open up countless doors for IoT functionality, a tiny wearable that is reliant on another device is like throwing a party in someone else’s house,” says Ran Craycroft, founder of UNA, a panic device for the elderly.

The real market opportunities may be for companies that can develop the platforms that mediate between devices and pair the most insightful predictive analytics with friendly, artificial intelligence-inspired interfaces.

One definition of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is software that mimics and generates human-like behaviors. Whether this is desirable is a subject of debate and there will be many who would prefer guaranteed rational and deterministic responses from the machines and automated services that surround us. However, AI is here to stay and, supported by the cloud, it represents a business that is worth around $136B in 2022, projected to rise to nearly $2T by 2030, according to Grand View Research. One worthy function of AI is the minimization of energy consumption both in the home and in industry, but AI computing itself consumes huge amounts of power, both in the ‘learning’ phase and in routine use. The largest data centers require a feed of more than 100MW as a result and this represents a high cost in dollars and to the environment, through the resulting carbon footprint. We’re considering AI, but of course other increased burdens include crypto currency mining, the IoT and social media/streaming.

A success story has been the relatively slow growth of energy consumption of data centers compared with ballooning data throughput and this has been largely due to continued improvements in energy efficiency of hardware and their power supplies. However, rack power density requirements are said to be 3x higher for AI than traditional data center functions and further efficiency gains get progressively more difficult to achieve. As a result, system designers are continually revisiting their power delivery architecture to look for ways to improve efficiency in the process of converting utility AC down to the sub-1V DC levels often required for GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs and ASICs.

Read the full article on the need for higher power density with maximum efficiency for AI from Flex Power Modules

A Remote Power Panel (RPP) provides local power distribution directly to server racks. These RP Panels are often located at the end of a server rack or on an adjacent wall and are generally used in place of overhead rack busbar to individually feed server cabinets.

Anord Mardix’s custom engineered RPP delivers unmatched power distribution and boasts the highest level of protection and performance for your critical power systems. Its highly compact footprint reduces operating costs, increases floor space and allows for the flexible expansion of your power distribution system in the future.

Learn more about Anord Mardix’s Remote Power Panels for server racks

Anord Mardix, a Flex company, is a global leader in critical power solutions. They offer an extensive product portfolio of critical power solutions including switchgear, busway, power distribution, and modular power systems, along with monitoring solutions and services.

When Rishi Israni and Pranoti Nagarkar realized just how difficult it was to make roti, they set out to automate the process. More than a decade later, they’ve seen their humble Zimplistic Rotimatic evolve into a global sensation.

Roti, the traditional Indian flatbread, doesn’t look all that difficult to make. Zimplistic Co-CEOs and founders Rishi Israni and Pranoti Nagarkar, the husband-and-wife duo behind the Rotimatic, would disagree.

The first memory I have of roti is when my mother would make it. We’d ask every day for her to come, sit down, and have dinner with us, but she’d be tucked away making hot roti because she’d insist it’s best when it’s straight from the pan.

— Pranoti Nagarkar, Co-CEO, Rotimatic

Feeding her kids a “fresh and warm roti” was a way for her mother to show affection, Pranoti says. Because she spent so much time making it, though, she rarely got the chance to sit and eat with her children.

“I remember trying to make it as a child,” Rishi recalls, “and realizing it wasn’t an easy thing, but something that was difficult to do.”

Indeed, making roti can be taxing. Starting with whole-wheat flour and water and mixing it into a dough, the batch is kneaded into a circular shape and left for about 10 minutes before being rolled out into individual rounds. Rishi says it can take more than half an hour to make a family-sized serving.

“We eat it with our lunch and dinner, and our son has eaten it since he’s had teeth,” he says. “As our lifestyles became busier, though, we started making it less because it was so tedious. We’d eat more rice or supermarket roti, which is not as nutritious.”

That was the impetus behind the Rotimatic, a kitchen appliance that can make roti with just the touch of a button. Invented by Pranoti and Rishi in 2008, the device simplifies the cooking process, resulting in fresh roti in a matter of minutes.

It takes proportionate quantities of flour required to make each roti, kneads and flattens the dough into discs, and moves the roti onto a heating plate to cook.

With billions of roti made by hand every day in India, Rishi says it made sense to automate the process. “It’s been attempted on an industry-wide scale, but this was the first attempt by a start-up to create a disruptive innovation in the field.”

Although Rishi says other companies had tried to automate the process, he says the Rotimatic stood out because “it was the first to succeed”.

Admittedly, building something the size of a coffee machine to make roti was difficult. Rishi says that kneading and rolling the roti dough requires technical judgement, which meant that automation and AI had to be prioritized.

“Billions of dollars have been poured into self-driving cars,” he says. “People don’t realize that smaller appliances in the kitchen need similar complexity and attention.”

That’s why when it came time to bring the Rotimatic to market, the duo relied on Flex and Eastool Industries to support the development and manufacturing process.

“We have contract manufacturers who have helped guide us and who have a long record of success in the manufacturing sector, and we’ve been grateful for their help,” says Pranoti.

Today, the Rotimatic is available in the United States, Singapore, and the Middle East, and more than 50,000 units have been sold globally. Having raised $30 million USD in funding during 2018, Zimplistic has generated sales revenue of approximately $50 million USD and developed a devoted base of customers.

Rishi says that engagement has helped to spread the Rotimatic’s popularity, with a “Rotimatic Owners” Facebook group of particular interest to him.

There are about 15,000 fans who can discuss the meals they’ve made with the device. Some have made tortillas, wraps, or flatbreads and added proteins and other nutritional supplements. The biggest innovations we see are the ones our customers come up with using our technology.

— Rishi Israni, Co-CEO, Rotimatic

As owners make everything from mango samosas to kaja with their Rotimatic, Pranoti says the machine will continue to find fans. “It’s a very versatile piece of technology.”

She adds that because the Rotimatic is so easy to use, it can help people lead healthier lifestyles. “Cooking a roti is easier than ever, meaning people can eat at home more often and manage their health better.”

The Rotimatic’s integration of AI and IoT is integral to its design. Rishi and Pranoti tell The CEO Magazine they are excited to bring innovation to the kitchen appliance sector.

Further, Zimplistic prepares to bring the Rotimatic to retailers throughout India, they’re confident the device will continue to find more customers around the globe.

“We’ve created a piece of technology that can make something that is consumed by 25% of the world’s population,” says Rishi.

“There are titans in the industry who are now contending with a younger and more innovative company that has created a whole new business category.”

This article originally appeared in CEO Magazine in May 2019. 

5G is here, and it will transform industries from healthcare to automotive. But to see the applications of emerging technology, you must start with the proper infrastructure. Designing and deploying 5G and wireless infrastructure is critical for enabling new use cases.

mmWave spectrum provides almost unlimited bandwidth for data-hungry 5G applications, but it hasn’t been widely deployed for mobile communications due to limited propagation distance. Today, by using a phased antenna array with beamforming, the radiated power and propagation distances are greatly improved. This improvement introduces new challenges of cost due to the need for complex RF chipsets and cooling technology for the mmWave phased array radios.

To meet these challenges, we developed a mmWave phased array reference design. This reference design uses a single board RF frontend with commercially available PCB material and RF chipsets to reduce cost. To maximize power, we incorporated low loss and matched feed network between the RF chipsets and the patch antenna array on the reverse side of the board. It also includes a unique coupling solution between the RF frontend board and the aluminum enclosure, dissipating heat and providing RF shielding between components.

Download this solution brief to learn how we can accelerate your time to market and reduce initial investment by partnering with us on your next 5G mmWave product. See how you can customize our mMIMO reference design and collaborate with our experienced wireless design team to meet your specific requirements. 

To learn more about our investment in mmWave for 5G applications, read this white paper, “Harnessing the Power of 5G,” which discusses this reference design and our investments in mmWave to solve bandwidth challenges, meet consumer needs, and ensure a step order increase in capacity and throughput.

Supply chains are being thrust onto center stage as never before. As a confluence of events has brought supply chains to various moments of reckoning over recent times, we dissect the ins and outs of rebalancing the manufacturing ecosystem in this blog series. In our first installment, we review the global landscape to size up the impetus for systemic change by restructuring our end-to-end production and distribution processes.

Amnesia and misaligned incentives may be among our worst enemies when it comes to building supply chain resilience for the long haul.

History says we tend to return to business as usual in due course in the aftermath of a crisis. Naturally, this includes returning to the bias towards under-diversified supply chains which has been identified in more than one study. Following major disruptions, finding a solution to address them becomes top priority, and investments are made to fortify the supply chain, including diversifying the supplier base.

Over time, however, these costs become burdensome. As the returns on preparing for rare catastrophic events are seldomly immediate, managers often revert to their pre-crisis mode in a bid to gain cost savings. After all, financial targets and other corporate practices reward efficiency and low cost.

As explained in one of the studies, we don’t have enough experience planning for black swan events for the simple reason that they are rare. Because we lack an understanding of such shock events, we also tend to underestimate their impact and forget the lessons learned once they become a distant memory.

Will be it different this time? 

With COVID-19, however, we may have reached a tipping point to reengineer our end-to-end chains at scale. The contagion was an unprecedented globally destablizing event with its initial epicenter being China, the well-calibrated site of the world’s manufacturing ecosystem. Today, the havoc wreaked by the pandemic is as fresh as ever. With reduced consumer demand for air travel, for instance, many are feeling the pinch of reduced cargo capacity as 40 percent of all shipments were handled by commercial aircraft pre-COVID. 

Even before the pandemic, powerful environmental, technological and political forces were already feeding an appetite to redesign corporate strategies and operations. The geopolitical undercurrents against open trade that preceded COVID-19 were motivating businesses to find ways to manage tariffs and other government-imposed cost regimes. Add to this the alarm bells that scientists and researchers have been sounding about various global risks which may finally be heeded in the wake of COVID-19 — and you have the ripest conditions yet to overcome entrenched human behavior and force a restructuring of corporate value chains at scale. 

Cost takes a back seat to security  

The repeating cycles of forming a crisis response only to revert to the status quo may finally be broken in a world fraught with rising risks.

Indeed, in the post-globalization era, it’s no longer only about driving down costs and increasing efficiencies but ensuring reliability across the value chain. As the world’s complexities and uncertainties continue to grow, so do risk exposures.

On the climate change front, scientists have warned of more frequent and extreme weather events. Weather problems can severely compromise upstream and downstream inputs, from labor to critical infrastructures like roads and transport. Accordingly, business leaders are recognizing climate change fallouts. Climate issues now rank as the top five risks by probability for the first time since the World Economic Forum (WEF) began surveying stakeholders for its annual Global Risk Report. Similarly, WEF’s 2020 Regional Risks for Doing Business Interactive Map shows environmental risks getting increased attention from executives. Notably, water scarcity also rose to prominence in the latest WEF global risk report, even though most businesses are still shrugging off this risk owing partly to the cheap cost of water.

In the virtual realm, large-scale cyber-attacks can also cripple supply chains, and such attacks against businesses have become more damaging and frequent. 

As the pandemic has demonstrated, a crisis can wreak havoc on a global scale and over-reliance on a consolidated supply source can come at a high cost in times of disruption. With multiple uncertainties on the horizon, putting security measures in place against disruption may increasingly trump their implementation costs. 

The hand of government 

As supply chains have become a matter of national security in the aftermath of COVID-19, governments are addressing systemic risks in our chains and calling on businesses to cooperate. 

Last month, the European Union joined the chorus call for regionalization, amplifying the need for “strategic autonomy” and “secure raw materials supply” in a series of European Commission summits and communiques. These talking points are part of Europe’s broader plan to develop resilient supply chains, strengthening raw materials sourcing within the region, and reducing dependencies on third countries. Also last month, President Trump issued an executive order for the United States to develop a secure precious minerals production capabilities in partnership with industry. Meanwhile, Japan earlier this year earmarked funds to incentivize businesses to diversify their supply base throughout the world and repatriate their production ecosystems. 

The government’s incentives and mandates — and disincentives like tariffs — have the potential to drive large-scale supply chain reorganization. Following a skirmish with China in 2010, for instance, Japan sought to reduce its Chinese rare earth materials imports which made up 58 percent of its total supply in 2019, down from 82 percent in 2010.

The upshot? Government can play well with the private sector through rational mandates and the right incentives.

Offsetting risks and trade barriers 

If the pandemic has taught supply chain managers anything, it is that over-dependence on any one partner, country or region can lead to critical issues and challenges. A diversified supplier base will usually cost more than a consolidated one; likewise, migrating a supply chain to regional markets also requires a hefty upfront investment. Yet the tradeoffs between security and costs must be weighed and failure to adapt in today’s highly dynamic world could lead to poor outcomes with dire financial consequences. 

Given our increasingly complex and interconnected world, sudden shocks are more probable than ever. Every 3.7 years on average, businesses can expect a supply chain disruption that lasts at least a month, and the most serious of these can have severe financial consequences, according to a 2020 McKinsey analysis.

This forecast coupled with present trade barriers and imminent global risks presents an opportunity to take proactive measures. Devising a continuity plan before the next disaster strikes can help minimize supply chain disruption. Managers would also do well to assess their top risks and understand the corresponding risk profiles for each supplier. Businesses can take steps to earnestly plan for black swan events, capitalizing on the fresh lessons learned from COVID-19 to explore alternative ways forward.

The critical precursor to tackling all the challenges facing supply chain managers will involve managing key tradeoffs — including striking a balance between security and costs so that your supply chain can withstand more frequent disruptions.

Explore the tactics for building a resilient supply chain

Smart automation drives the transition to industry 4.0

Legacy manufacturing systems are transitioning to smart, connected, automated systems. We’re not only moving through the industry 4.0 transition with you; we’re helping define it.

How we help define industry 4.0

We’re cutting costs and improving efficiency with technology to automate processes, collect data, and integrate to the entire production network. We look closely at the data we collect to gather insights that drive best practices and improvements. Striving for accuracy is core to our predictive intelligence, not only to lower costs but also to use energy and materials efficiently, which contributes to building a sustainable future. This is what we call modern manufacturing.

Smart sensors

Sensors can make lighting, heating, and machinery more cost efficient and sustainable. They give us the ability to deep dive into data to predict potential inefficiencies in a production line and make improvements as we measure our success. They allow us to look at our systems objectively and give us real-time accurate information.

Our sensors are enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded in the system, automating the process of data collection. They have the potential to capture every detail. Sensors feed data to machines that crunch the data to gather insights into where improvements can be made. This machine-to-machine communication and analytics capacity speeds up and scales production — enhancing your ability to compete.

Retrofitting existing machines to collect data

Today’s machines need to be flexible and easy to redeploy. A machine designed to work for 50,000 hours may need to perform on high volume initially, but when a product becomes outdated or upgraded, it needs to be ready for a new application. This is different from the traditional model in which a machine plays a specific role for years or even decades.

Companies with expensive machinery are not ready to throw them out. Most need to continue producing with their expensive equipment that was designed — and costed out — to last for decades.

But now they need to provide data so we can accurately measure speed, output, and ability. How do we address this challenge? We retrofit existing machines with new tools and systems and make sure they can remain functional so their owners can remain competitive.

With our deep understanding of the manufacturing process, we can bridge the gaps between old technology and new technology, communication, and automation.

Modular automation and robotics

In our own factories, we are increasingly seeing the benefits of smart automation and robotics as modular systems. Automation is not about introducing one new machine — it’s about getting many machines to communicate with each other and work side-by-side with humans in harmony. This requires a new way of thinking, combined with highly targeted business goals and intelligent machine-to-machine communications.

Supporting wide adoption of industry 4.0 standards 

While industry 4.0 has been in the works for several decades, the technology and standards driving the infrastructure are still very new.

To support the future of modern manufacturing, we believe in working with open standards and support wide adoption of these standards to ease collaboration between all the players in manufacturing.

Our Flex GC Scott Offer and DGC Andy Powell share how their legal department prioritizes, tracks, and improves compliance and ethics — and how yours can too. The original version of this article appeared in the ACC Docket.

Gone are the days of in-house legal organizations acting as siloed departments. Instead, today’s top teams are fully integrated with their business colleagues.

Not only are they tasked with providing strategic counsel and risk management, but they are also asked to support decision-making in essential areas like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and, increasingly, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts.

In addition, a top priority for every in-house team in 2022 and beyond should be ethics and compliance. The reason? Establishing (or enhancing) a value-based ethical and compliant culture can help limit legal exposure and improve financial results, boost employees’ happiness, and sharpen a brand’s image.

However, these teams may be facing an uphill battle. GBES’s 2021 State of Ethics & Compliance in the Workplace report showed that nearly one-third of all global employees reported feeling pressure to compromise their organization’s ethics standards during periods of change.

Thus, how can busy in-house legal departments prioritize, track, and improve compliance and ethics? We asked ourselves this question at Flex in April 2020.

A data-based approach

Going into this project, we knew it was nearly impossible for in-house counsel to police compliance for all of Flex’s 160,000 employees across 100 plus sites in 30 countries. Instead, we decided to extend our team’s reach by scaling ethics and compliance adherence, making it a part of every site and department leader’s job.

To ensure this approach was effective, we increased transparency with data. We developed an integrated scorecard that leverages the vast amount of information our company collects each year from various sources.

The goal? Create a process that helps “hold up the mirror” to leaders and measures their performance in the areas of compliance, ethics, and risk.

Flex trusts our employees to do the right thing, and they almost always do. Our managers are generally effective at managing ethics and compliance, but it gets more challenging to know what is going on in larger groups.

The integrated scorecard empowers managers of larger teams with data assembled from various sources in an easy-to-understand format. The manager can then see how they and their teams perform and identify any trends and hotspots. The manager is responsible for developing and executing any remedial action plan. In this way, managers understand where weaknesses exist and are accountable for the outcomes.

The team and information behind the scorecard

This journey to a data-driven, value-based ethical and compliant culture requires an incredible amount of collaboration. For Flex, and most other organizations, it requires a top-down mandate from leadership with support from a cross-functional group of legal, compliance, IT, internal audit, and human resources leaders.

It’s essential to ensure group commitment from the beginning, so each team is on the same page and working towards the same goal.

If any department is sensitive about sharing data widely due to confidentiality, privacy, or commercial sensitivity, early collaboration can help break down silos and balance the risks versus benefits appropriately. It’s also the only way to obtain a holistic view of a company’s ethics and compliance performance.

With a unified approach established, teams can begin identifying data that will help document each site’s “score,” including cultural surveys, hotline reporting, compliance reports, audit assessments, and more. Each of these data sets usually lives within an existing software system.

With the support of APIs, plug-ins, automation, and help from IT, teams can generate a transparent scorecard that provides a near real-time look at each site’s ethics and compliance record.

Driving value from the scorecard

As the saying goes, “You can’t change what you don’t measure.” The scorecard measurement resolves this by enabling change management.

The data from the scorecard empowers site leadership with information to create action plans that address potential issues, situations, and hot spots before they become a problem. The scorecard can also help identify misconduct, unethical behavior, and compliance lapses across regions and departments.

Thanks to scorecard reporting at Flex, we’ve even been able to pinpoint ethics and compliance issues down to specific production lines in a factory. The response to these issues can often be easy fixes, like improving the working conditions or changing shift patterns and supervision.

With all the data coming in, we can also identify interesting correlations between events such as large product ramps with aggressive schedules and higher incidences of workplace misconduct.

This enables us to be more proactive and predict where potential flashpoints may pop up so we can get ahead of it with targeted training and tone setting.

Ultimately, the scorecard provides an easy, repeatable, and scalable process for organizations to prioritize, track, and improve compliance and ethics. It enables managers to chart performance over weeks, months, and years, incorporating the scores and progress into regular communications that enforce zero-tolerance.

As a result, it drives ethics further down the management chain. It also enables managers to make better decisions, prioritize where they need to focus their efforts and provide a closed-loop accountability system. It can even provide the ability to compare sites and functions against each other.

From a leadership perspective, the scorecard is one of the first things Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi asks for at every site that she visits, emphasizing their importance and our overall strategy to improve culture from the corner office to the factory floor.

Infusing artificial intelligence — and more data

That’s just the start of the scorecard journey. The future of the legal profession is ripe with data-driven practices.

The scorecard can only grow from here, adding more data feeds from other sources, including trade, health and safety, security, and more. With big data analytics and artificial intelligence, we can create a system to identify and hopefully predict ethics and compliance lapses so we can get ahead of them in the future.

This approach completely switches the focus of in-house counsel from traditional policy setting, training, and policing to using and managing more data and data-driven insights. This helps the legal team integrate more closely with the business to identify patterns and proactively prevent incidents before they happen.

Demonstrating value with metrics

A big part of any new business initiative, especially the scorecard, is to prove the value you’re adding to the business, and data doesn’t lie.

Showing specific examples of misconduct or compliance issues identified by the scorecard makes the conversation real. It helps eliminate emotion and address the problem head-on. It’s even more powerful when you can highlight outside counsel fees, investigative costs, internal costs, and financial penalties that were avoided due to the scorecard.

Further, with the scorecard, you can benchmark where your company is now and show there is a direct correlation between having a strong ethical culture and stock performance or other financial metrics. It’s right there in the data.

It won’t be an easy journey, but the results will be worth it. Enhancing or transforming to a value-based ethical and compliant culture starts with an energized legal team, a vision and a cross-functional approach to data.

Good luck on your journey!

The original version of this article appeared in the ACC Docket.