From the home office to the production floor, 70,000+ Flex employees use Zoom to communicate globally

When you get into a car, do the laundry, or connect to the internet, you might be using a product built by Flex.

As a global manufacturing and supply chain leader, Flex is the company behind essential products and parts reaching across many different industries. “Flex manufactures products that touch people’s lives every day,” said Sergio Dammroze, Flex’s director of collaborative solutions. 

Complexity is a given, especially when it comes to managing the company’s large, distributed workforce — 170,000 employees in 30 countries around the world.

“Being in different countries, in different facilities, there’s a lot of innovation happening at each site,” said Diofanto “Dio” Rosales, vice president, digital workplace and IT infrastructure. “We need our multiple sites, regions, and functions to be connected and share best practices to serve our customers, or find cross-industry synergies between the different segments we work with.”

Sergio and Dio needed to find a simpler way for employees to communicate, whether they were on the manufacturing floor in Sorocaba, Brazil, or Flex’s corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas. They sought a platform that would help facilitate the rapid exchange of information in a fast-moving environment.

Since Flex is a global manufacturing and supply chain partner, reliability and performance were key. Innovation was important, too — they wanted a platform that was constantly evolving, introducing new products to support Flex’s vast operations. 

“With operations in more than 30 countries, we needed a solution that was fast, reliable, and secure. We needed to find the perfect solution,” Sergio said.

“We were looking for a very easy-to-use platform — that would just work but would not require any training at all,” Dio added. “And this is what we got with Zoom.”

Zoom Team Chat: a hub for communication

Flex started using Zoom Meetings in 2017 and quickly began seeing the benefits of the full platform upon introducing Zoom Webinars, Rooms, Workspace Reservation, Team Chat, and Phone to their teams.

“Zoom Rooms was a natural evolution for our conference rooms, with multiple hardware choices and flexibility for any room size,” Sergio said. “Zoom Team Chat was another solution that was simple and easy to implement — our employees were already familiar with using Zoom in their day-to-day routine.”

The majority of Flex’s global workforce is on the frontlines of manufacturing, building products for a diverse set of customers. However, more than 70,000 Flex employees use Zoom Team Chat on a daily basis to collaborate remotely from long distances — a 200% increase since Flex first introduced Team Chat in 2021. Engineering and design teams use it to provide status updates on projects they’re working on together. Subject matter experts share knowledge or best practices in chat so more employees can stay informed and benefit from their expertise. That collaboration extends to other parts of the platform, like Zoom Whiteboard, with 13,000 whiteboards created.

For Dio, Team Chat is an essential part of how his distributed team communicates — he has team members in India, Malaysia, Brazil, and his home country of Mexico. “Communication across our teams is important — it requires a high degree of collaboration and alignment for us to be successful. All of this collaboration and coordination is enabled by the Zoom platform,” he said.

Migrating to Zoom Phone reduced infrastructure 50-70%

Zoom enabled Flex employees to communicate seamlessly across video and chat. The company looked to Zoom Phone as a natural next step to consolidating communications. 

Implementing a new phone system in 100 facilities worldwide was no small feat, but Flex’s team had support every step of the way.

“Zoom Professional Services was fundamental to the success of our Zoom Phone migration. From the planning and design to brainstorming possible solutions, escalating cases, managing the porting of our numbers with the phone carriers, and supporting us on migration day, it was a good example of teamwork between our teams,” Sergio said.

Flex’s previous phone solution required its own infrastructure and proprietary hardware, and had a reduced range of coverage. Instead of investing in infrastructure to have reliable coverage across the campuses, Sergio explained that his team configured mobile devices to meet their unique security requirements. Now, employees can access Zoom Phone, Meetings, and Team Chat on the production floor instead of going back to their stations, so their support in the field is optimized. 

A collaboration that’s constantly evolving

A unified communications solution like Zoom helps cut through the complexities of Flex’s hybrid, global workforce, connecting tens of thousands of employees on a daily basis on a secure platform.

“Cybersecurity is so important these days, so we are pleased that Zoom takes cybersecurity and data privacy very seriously,” Dio said. 

Because Zoom is easy to use, Dio says that training requirements are low, but adoption is high. “We pretty much have the client installed on every single computer in Flex. We’re using Team Chat very actively,” Dio said. “Zoom is very easy to use — it just works. We have super high adoption by our users. And we have a very solid relationship with Zoom.”

As Zoom continues to introduce new capabilities, like AI Companion meeting summaries and Workvivo’s employee engagement platform, Sergio and Dio look forward to exploring how they’ll continue to improve communication and streamline collaboration for Flex employees with Zoom. 

“As our industry is going through an evolution, we’re excited to have a partner like Zoom that keeps evolving,” Dio said.