CASE STUDY: Flex Empowers Employees with LISA Avatar Assistant

LISA, Flex’s ML Award-winning avatar-based line stop assistant, helps significantly improve front line operations while empowering employees to succeed.   

Company Fact File –

Company: Flex
Sector: Technology, Supply Chain, Manufacturing Solutions
HQ location: San Jose, Calif., U.S.
Revenues: $10 billion+
Employees: 5,000+ employees, 30 countries
Web url: www.flex.com

Flex’s factory in Althofen, Austria, faced a business challenge: How to make its product lines more efficient in a high-mix, low-volume manufacturing environment where small inefficiencies can have an outsized impact on both the manufacturer’s and the customers’ bottom line.

Flex’s Althofen factory makes more than 500 products in lot sizes ranging from 100 to 3 million pieces, for more than 30 customers. In any given month, the factory manufactures products ranging from parts for lawn mowers to components for automotive GPS systems to Class III medical devices. Every time there is a product changeover, the equipment on the line is reconfigured, a process that requires precision and accuracy. And the factory performs more than 900 of these line changeovers every month.

“It is like a NASCAR pit stop – moving parts, moving people, and every second makes a difference,” says Paul Baldassari, Flex Executive Vice President.

The Flex team was tasked with finding a way to use automation to reduce costly errors that took place during product changeovers. However, like a NASCAR pit stop, success depends not only on the right technology, but also the skillset of workers who can quickly and efficiently shift gears as needs and product lines change.

The result is LISA, Flex’s avatar-based line stop assistant. This innovative system is already putting the company on the fast track when it comes to stopping a production line that is wrongly configured for the product and stopping untrained operators from proceeding. In fact, LISA has already helped the factory reduce changeover time by 10.5%, reduce line clearance time by 85%, and reduce quality-related downtime by 56%, all while empowering employees to succeed.