Case Study
Simulation and digital twin for medical manufacturing
As the healthcare industry rapidly evolves, Flex provides specialized end-to-end capabilities that enable medical product companies to deliver products at scale with increased quality, productivity, and speed, in every major region. With the ability to partner at any point of the product lifecycle, Flex helps healthcare companies navigate increasing complexity across the value chain to design, build, deliver, and service medical products that transform patient care.
With over 35 years of experience across medical equipment, medical devices, and drug delivery, healthcare customers turn to Flex for our user-centered design and engineering expertise, advanced manufacturing technology and vertically-integrated capabilities, and diverse supply chain network. Our comprehensive portfolio of product lifecycle capabilities is fortified by our world-class quality management system for healthcare, enabling customers to meet the most stringent compliance standards needed for Class I, II, and III medical products.
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With healthcare companies redesigning their insourced operating models and collaborating with new partners to optimize operations, Flex brings the domain expertise required to accelerate innovation cycles for a range of medical products.
Leverage our patient-centered design approach, domain expertise, and deep understanding of complex product requirements across six global medical design and engineering centers. Flex’s team of human factors experts, design engineers provide cross-industry knowledge of a range of technologies, including connectivity, edge artificial intelligence, and sensor integration. We also specialize in multidisciplinary systems combining optics for medical devices such as imaging, illumination, and lasers.
Flex’s focused portfolio of advanced manufacturing technologies — including simulation, automation, robotics, digitization, and additive manufacturing — provide a competitive edge to meet your time-to-market, resiliency, and end-market requirements. Our global footprint includes 21 medical manufacturing sites across four regions and 13 countries, providing medical customers the ability to quickly adjust to changing regional, trade, and manufacturing dynamics.
With 14 FDA-certified sites and 21 sites with ISO 13485:2016 certification — the internationally recognized quality management benchmark for medical device manufacturers — Flex enables customers to meet the highest quality and compliance standards for regulated medical products. Customers utilize our extensive precision plastics experience in injection molding and mold fabrication to produce and deliver the highest quality products, every time.
Flex leverages our global supply chain expertise, capabilities, and digital tools to enable customers to deliver medical products to market with less complexity and risk. With a global supply chain that spans 4,000 global and local supplier relationships and 1 million parts, we help partners de-risk their complex component and inventory strategies and needs. Our vertically integrated capabilities, including advanced electronics assembly, components and materials subassembly, and systems integration, enable customers to quickly scale to high volume production.
Flex enables market-leading healthcare brands to deliver a seamless customer experience and embrace sustainable practices. Offering value-added fulfillment and a global network of fulfillment centers, Flex enables the configuration and fulfillment of products for specific market and channel needs. Our integrated reverse logistics and circular economy services, including CO2 analytics, returns and screening, repair, refurbishment, enable customers to extend the life of medical products at scale.
Delivering large-scale medical equipment and high-volume healthcare consumables and disposables.
Providing intelligent, connected medical devices that help consumers and healthcare providers better manage care.
Enabling drug delivery products that are easy to use, accurate, smart, and connected.
Flex’s patient-centered design approach has received multiple industry recognitions including Medical Design Excellence Awards and International Design Excellence Awards for products ranging from a surgical navigation system and a breast biopsy table, to a robotic guidewire delivery system and a pneumatic walking boot.
Flex has the end-to-end, vertically integrated solutions you need to take your low-volume, large-scale equipment from concept to care. This spans the complete product lifecycle, from user-centric product design with human factors engineering and optics design expertise through our localized supply chain and component services to advanced manufacturing of PCBAs and full-system assemblies. Closing the loop, our post production and post sale services allow you to harness our global scale to help meet your end-customer and regulatory needs.
We help you reduce risk and total cost of ownership by manufacturing your medical equipment at the location that’s right for you. We have facilities across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, or we can bring our capabilities even closer through colocation at your or your customers’ sites.
Our expertise in advanced manufacturing technologies allows us to bring our large-scale medical equipment capabilities to smaller, volume-driven products. With a tailored and considered approach, we accelerate the delivery of consumables and disposables for the healthcare market.
Whether your product is high precision or general use, we can help build your single-use products, such as IV bags, diagnostic catheters, tubing sets, wound kits, and other disposable devices, with tight tolerance and repeatability at scale.
Our manufacturing sites offer various levels of automation to help lower costs and improve quality. And our capabilities are vertically integrated, which means we can build, kit, package, and distribute your products around the world.
Asensus is harnessing our extensive design for manufacturing expertise to assess LUNA’s manufacturability and to maximize its assembly and testing efficiency.
Backed by an optimized global supply chain,our approach will help ensure a fast and seamless transition from protoypes to full-scale manufacturing. Flex is currently refining the design of Asensus Surgical’s LUNA™ surgical robotic system ahead of full-scale production. This system digitizes the surgeon-patient interface, pioneering a new era of precise, performance-guided surgery.
Flex is a leader in delivering innovative medical devices that improve patient care around the world. Our expertise with new product introductions (NPI) and manufacturing ramps is why medical device companies have been collaborating with us for more than 35 years.
Our concept-to-care approach supports your entire product lifecycle. From product design with user-centric human factors engineering through our regionalized supply chain and component services to advanced PCBA manufacturing and full-system assembly. Once your product is designed, sourced, and built, harness our global scale with a full suite of post production and post sale services.
Proactive consumer healthcare monitoring helps healthcare providers by supplying vital day-to-day tracking information that can be easily reviewed and frees providers’ time to focus on other healthcare challenges.
We can help you deliver these intelligent, connected devices to consumers and healthcare providers, from diabetes management systems to surgical tools that are lightweight, untethered, and easy to use.
When a leading medical device company needed to upgrade their existing patient medical alert system to incorporate LTE cellular technology ahead of 3G networks being decommissioned, they turned to Flex for a turnkey solution.
The upgrade needed to provide reliable cellular connectivity for patient communication, maintain the quality of short range wireless service to patient accessory pendants and ensure audio quality remained best in class.
Flex performed exhaustive testing of candidate cellular radios and antennae, and we developed a solution that met the requirements of the customer and worked with cellular carriers around the world. We then performed design verification testing, developed production testing, and successfully transferred manufacturing to a Flex site.
We utilize the latest advancements to help pharmaceutical companies meet stringent drug delivery device demands for connectivity, cybersecurity integration, and ease of use for at-home care.
From human factors engineering-powered product design through our regionalized supply chain with integrated component services to full scale manufacturing of everything from PCBAs to full-systems, our services cover the complete product lifecycle. This includes post production and post sale services that help you meet your unique end-customer and regulatory needs.
Customers also rely on our precision injection molding and mold fabrication capabilities. With seven global sites, we are among the largest medical tool-making facilities in the world and are renowned for complex multi-extrusion molds.
of drug delivery experience
of the top pharma companies as customers
drug delivery device concepts developed
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A leading global pharma company needed an autoinjector with an ergonomic design created specifically for chronic injectable therapies. Key features for the product included a skin sensor for safety, a hidden needle, a large handle, push button audio, a lighted injection progress bar, and speed control of dosing.
Flex provided a turnkey solution for a reusable autoinjector equipped with connectivity for patient monitoring and cloud data management via 4G wireless technology. We delivered a custom mechanical design that integrated internal hardware subsystems, electrical design, and device software, then ramped final production within three months.
