How can flextronics leverage this information

When it comes to the particulars of a specific product line, these are managed by a strategic supply chain team that oversees all related operations. As the first line of defense when issues arise, this team constantly assesses risks and collaborates closely with planning, procurement and other teams to optimize operational shifts and decisions specific to addressing the product and customer needs.

Utilizing dashboards in our Flex Pulse system we wasted no time in taking action. Our global resilience team immediately engaged as the ground-zero command and control center. By instinct, collaboration became the order of the day. Our China teams guided us through pandemic risk reduction best practices, including how often to change masks and how to sanitize and deep clean our factories.

In parallel, we set up war rooms around the world hosting executive meetings every day. This cascaded into many follow-up conversations and action items with cross-functional teams worldwide to identify solutions around the clock. My organization along with the resilience team and other cross-functional peers held global daily calls. Our first priority was to understand all the parts originating from China, and freeze the current order status, ensuring no open orders were pushed or cancelled.

To gain visibility into the actual supply and demand, we then reconfirmed forecasts with customers and orders with suppliers to verify that what was on order was still required by customers and produced by suppliers. Everyone pitched in and the information became visible and actionable via Flex Pulse real-time dashboards.

Once we sized up supply and demand the best we could, we needed to figure out how to move the parts to meet production schedules then deliver the finished goods. Through this highly fluid situation where we were operating on imperfect information, I wanted to hear everyone's voice. We had many daily discuss-debate-decide moments in rapid succession as the number of decisions required each day stretched over 12 to 16 hours at the height of the pandemic.

During this time shortages became an issue, and this hit our healthcare solutions group particularly hard. The team went from experiencing normal shortages for around 25 parts in late January to shortages of hundreds of parts within weeks. Some relief came by way of the strong collaborative relationships we have established with our suppliers over many years, which enabled us to dramatically reduce the replenishment cycle for certain key parts while securing commitments for continuous shipment.

We have more than 1, customers and about 1, different supply chains that we manage on behalf of customers. Our initial use of Flex Pulse and the associated data was to offer visibility across all the supply chains to the factories and then provide information on how the inventory was being consumed in production.

Turning inventory around quicker helps us free up cash flow that we can invest in other parts of our business. Flex Pulse also has given our commodity management teams better insights into inventory trends—where inventory is currently sourced, where it needs to be sourced and how to group sourcing. We have key suppliers that service many of our customers, and Flex Pulse solutions give us better insights and leverage when we negotiate sourcing with those suppliers.

This combination provides us with a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Initially, we focused on the inbound supply chain at a high level, but soon turned our attention to the factory, showing our operations and inventory teams where products were in production and in relation to forecasted orders and ship dates. We then turned our attention to the outbound side of production and performance. Beyond that level, measurements started to focus on yield and production quality through real-time data deployment on the factory floor.

This approach enables Flextronics to deliver highly competitive services in an increasingly complex industry with a diverse, competitive customer base. It also allows Flextronics to make fast, flexible decisions in response to changing market conditions. Flextronics delivers value and innovation to their OEM customers through the following business groups.

ICE is organized to drive ideas from concept to consumption. Flextronics Executive Leadership Team:. Reporting directly to the Vice President, Business Development — CTG Business Segment, the Senior Director, Business Development CTG is responsible for participating in the formation and execution of corporate and strategic plans and to create new business and sustain current accounts. The ideal candidate must be very comfortable with a hands-on, multi-dimensional, high growth business development leadership role.

Flextronics brings strong leadership capability into a competitive marketplace. This type of challenge is a selling point for the right individual, who can appreciate the magnitude of the breakout opportunity presented to them. Flextronics is looking for a passionate yet humble, unselfish, thick-skinned, extremely creative well-balanced leader who will thrive in this fast-paced, team-oriented environment.

The dynamic nature of Flextronics' business demands this person have the flexibility to both drive and adapt to change, push their own personal and professional limits, and possess the character to stand in the face of uncertainty, and the judgment and experience to know which course to pursue. To stay agile, we use various sourcing and engineering technologies to help find alternate parts when faced with identified supply constraints.

Using electronic data interchange EDI capabilities that automate information exchange between two or more computers, Flex and our suppliers seamlessly share transactional documents such as RFQs, purchase orders, and invoices without any human interference. Once documents land at their destinations, automated notifications and workflows are triggered.

Both Flex and our suppliers can share in the benefits of this system, including reduced costs, faster processing and lower error rates, all making for improved relationships. Before assuming my current role, I was on the leadership team of Avnet, a Flex supplier. As the eyes and ears of our distributed manufacturing and distribution ecosystem, Flex Pulse is aligned to more than internal processes and connected to hundreds of internal and third-party systems and data sources.

Programs and algorithms process this data to produce more than real-time dashboards that ladder up to an integrated view of our entire value chain.

Thanks to these intuitive and real-time visualizations, our teams can spot potential risks ranging from parts shortage to logistical bottlenecks before they become serious problems. We have visibility into the linkages through which our materials move across the world. In virtualizing our business processes from parts qualification to tracking shipments, we also digitized the physical goods and assets in our manufacturing ecosystem.

This means Pulse ingests information down to single parts, allowing us to drill down to a part number by customer with just a few clicks! When Flex Pulse flags an issue, it triggers corresponding actions for resolution. Apart from helping us manage risk, Flex Pulse has also helped to optimize our inventory levels, generating cost savings in the millions and improving cash flows. This is the perfect collaboration tool as the seamless flow of information with flagged issues and actions are visible to everyone across the organization, erasing functional silos and geographic barriers.

That everyone from procurement to materials management to logistics sees the same information means we have a single source of truth, allowing us to form a coordinated response and improve collaboration with our suppliers across our production facilities around the world!

As the world becomes more complex, vigilance is the order of the day. We strive to look deep and wide into our network to mitigate risks by subscribing to multiple third-party data sources.