LISA transforms changeovers on the shop floor

Throughout the world, Flex operates facilities that specialize in high-mix, low-volume manufacturing. These sites produce relatively small quantities of wide-ranging products for medical, automotive, and industrial applications that tend to be complex with specific quality requirements. As the broad product mix translates to frequent production changeovers, there is inevitable downtime along with the potential for introducing errors whenever programs, processes, materials, and tooling need to be changed to accommodate production shifts.

Introducing LISA

Flex Althofen in Austria is a high-mix, low-volume facility that serves more than 25 customers with a portfolio of 500+ highly complex products in lot sizes ranging from 100 to three million units. Building more than 600 different products that range from automotive GPS systems to Class III medical devices in any given month, Flex Althofen sees a monthly average of 900 product changeovers.

As the site’s frequent, complex changeovers were part of its daily routine, the team sought to improve how these processes were managed. Inspired by the poka-yoke lean manufacturing method, or “mistake-proofing” in Japanese, the team began developing a line stop assistant to minimize changeover errors in January 2019.

The result was LISA, a 24/7 Line Stop Assistant that has real-time access to all the data sources related to the production lines.

See LISA in action:

LISA delivers

Prior to LISA, team members relied on checklists to set up the assembly lines and this manual process introduced the potential for errors that could drive up costs, waste, and other inefficiencies. If someone loads the wrong recipe for an assembly, for instance, the output had to be scrapped.