Flextronics: Building a Strategic HR Organization from Scratch

Flextronics: Building a Strategic HR Organization from Scratch

Introduction

Flextronics International is a provider of electronics manufacturing services (EMS) and advanced design in the aerospace, automotive, industrial, medical and computing, digital consumer, infrastructure and mobile phone. The company also provides logistics services such as freight forwarding, warehouse and inventory management, e-commerce outsourcing solutions and aftermarket services. Flextronics was established in 1990 with headquarters in Singapore and has operations in four continents.

Flextronics has manufacturing operations in more than 30 countries around the world (Flextronics, 2013). This company has a contract with Microsoft to continue assembling products Zune, Xbox and Xbox 360 as well as with other major companies such as Alcatel Lucent, Flextronics also manufacture the new Blackberry torch or 9800, which was released in August 2010 and several teams from RIM Blackberry.

Discussion

Challenges Faced by the company

Flextronics along with other companies in the industry were facing the change of business model in the industry. Customers were increasing in the market, where they were asking for constant quality and delivery despite their region, and asking for services in different locations including Hungary, China, Mexico and Brazil.

Asian companies were growing faster in market, leaving European and North American companies behind, with having different business model. Flextronics has recognized that they need a new business model to survive in the industry. Another challenge that the company faced was the absence of leadership, which was becoming a barrier in success.

The biggest challenges of all for the leadership were to create a completely new Human Resource organization from the scratch, which was unlike other Human Resource transformation attempts push an organization to “strategic” from “nonstrategic”.

Internal and external influences impacting Flextronics

One of the bigger challenges that were being faced by Flextronics was that of increasing competition from dot-com. The rise in the dot com industry has stalled their growth, and despite taking numerous corrective measures, they have to make sure that compete well against some of these businesses. They were influenced by some other organizations that have centre of excellence that really helps them to streamline their business processes as well as making sure that sustainable growth is being achieved.

As far as internal strengths are concerned, it has to be said that the absence of centralized HR function has been one of the bigger issues that have been confronted by Flextronics. They have not really focused a lot on their HR capabilities and due to this, they cannot have the strategic edge thus achieving such growth might be an issue in the long run.

On the other hand, it has to be said that the company was focusing rather successfully on having good relationships with its customers. They were offering different design capabilities and due to these capabilities, they were in a better position to make by their handy manufacturing processes. These are some of the influences of Flextronics.

Critical Phase in HR Transformation

One of the most important phases was to identify the core capabilities. They looked at and identified the ...