Alpha is a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturing services and supply chain logistics company: Operations Excellence and Quality Management Case Study, SMU, Singapore

Case Study

Alpha is a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturing services and supply chain logistics company. It was founded over 50 years ago in the United States. Its original charter was to provide overflow manufacturing of printed circuit boards for companies based in America. Over the next several decades, the company broadened its scope to become a contract electronics manufacturing firm, pioneering automated manufacturing techniques, and becoming the first American manufacturer to construct an offshore manufacturing facility in Singapore. Through the acquisition of other manufacturers, the company expanded its global footprint to become one of the largest electronics manufacturing services and original design manufacturing companies in the world. It now boasts manufacturing operations in over 30 countries and employs over 100,000 people. The company’s mission statements are as follows:

Make great products for our customers that create value and improve people’s lives.”

“Steward sustainable manufacturing and operations practices to minimize environmental impact.”

To do this, it employs many advanced manufacturing techniques, including automation and robotics, simulation and software, and additive manufacturing. The company plays in quite a few areas, providing complete design, engineering, and manufacturing services to fields including aerospace, automotive, computing, industrial, consumer, infrastructure, medical, and more.

Of particular importance at this current global moment is its involvement in the medical sector, where it claims a spot in the Top 20 global manufacturers of medical devices. You probably have heard about the potential shortages of life-saving ventilators in hospitals overloaded with critical Covid-19 patients. The company makes those. Furthermore, the company says that this year alone, it will manufacture over 35,000 of these ventilators. That is more than the total amount of ventilators built by all the other global manufacturers last year combined. Other crucial medical products it manufactures include oxygenators, patient monitors, testing equipment, and ICU-related necessities. In the case of its five different ventilator programs, the company says it ramped up and started shipping units in five weeks, much quicker than the traditional 9-18 months it usually takes to bring new medical technology to bear. Given the urgency of the crisis, the company’s expedition of the process is crucial.

The company’s CEO explained the company’s response to the current pandemic. Its top concern during the crisis is its employees’ health and safety. Most of the workforce are factory workers, a demographic that is particularly susceptible to spreading the virus due to their often-close proximity to each other on factory floors. However, given the essential work it is doing to aid the relief efforts, simply closing down for a few months is not an option.

Instead, the company says it invested significant resources into employee protection protocols. It implemented its contingency and resiliency plan, which included the creation of 24/7 war rooms across its various regions and bi-weekly CEO briefings on the crisis. The first order of business was ensuring employee health and safety so that they could safely get back to work. The company implemented a wide range of employee safety measures, including physical separations of workstations, temperature screenings, the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE), restrictions on travel and visitors, isolation protocols, and the sterilization of all work and common areas, as well as HVAC systems.