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.
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.
From imaging systems to hospital beds, our advanced technology integration and award-winning industrial designs optimize your product delivery.
Large-scale medical equipment can be challenging to build and transport. Our highly trained global teams ensure that you have access to global and regional manufacturing, experienced guidance to optimize shipping and regulatory logistics, design engineering, and supply chain stability and flexibility.
At the other end of the spectrum of the medical equipment landscape are high-scale, volume-driven healthcare consumables and disposables.
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 is automated to help lower costs and improve quality. And our supply chain is vertically integrated, which means we can kit, package, and distribute your products around the world.
Today’s e-consumers monitor their health status with always-on medical technology and devices that help them manage their healthcare, with the ability to share results with their doctor.
Proactive consumer healthcare monitoring helps healthcare providers by providing vital day-to-day tracking information that can be easily reviewed and frees providers’ time to focus on more complex 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.
As patients self-administer medicine, solutions that are a part of their daily lives can help keep them on track. A drug delivery product needs to be easy to use, accurate, smart, and connected.
Our expertise in sensors, miniaturization of electro-mechanical drive systems, power management, and wearables allow us to codesign drug delivery systems with improved dose accuracy while keeping the device comfortable and easy to use. So, patients can stick to their prescriptions and improve outcomes.
We excel at plastic tooling, a key component of drug delivery systems. Our seven global sites are among the largest medical tool-making facilities in the world. And our design teams use Value Analysis and Value Engineering (VAVE) principles to bring value analysis to existing products with the goal to increase value in the market by either decreasing the price, increasing functionality, or both.
