Flex is a global supply chain and manufacturing company that partners with customers to design and build products that improve the world. Flex’s global workforce of approximately 160,000 employees in more than 30 countries provides a competitive advantage.

Flex Pulse, Flex’s supply chain visualization tool that integrates data from multiple operational applications, is a key component in the company’s ability to deliver innovative solutions for customers across multiple industries and end markets. However, Flex’s legacy, on-premises data architecture could not handle the amount of data that was required and was rapidly approaching end-of-life status. Seeking to modernize its data environment and expand data-driven decision-making, Flex turned to Snowflake.

Migrating 15,000+ objects in just five months

Working with Snowflake Professional Services allowed Flex to move faster and achieve its aggressive migration timeline. Snowflake’s teams of experts provided the right mix of code conversion services and tools, product knowledge, and user training to help keep the project on track. Within five months of project kickoff, Flex successfully migrated 15,689 objects—including 11,640 tables and views, 2,532 BI objects, and 1,320 scripts and procedures—and converted its entire code base. “Even if we had more time, we would have still worked with the Snowflake team,” said Sukumar Bhasker, Flex’s Vice President, IT Solutions and Analytics. 

Once implemented, Snowflake’s multi-cluster shared data architecture and consumption-based pricing helped solved Flex’s data storage limitations and enabled enhanced levels of transparency for cost monitoring and optimization. Near-zero maintenance freed up technical talent to focus on higher-impact work. Snowflake Secure Data Sharing created new opportunities for data-driven collaboration. Snowflake Data Marketplace offered a convenient solution for accessing live, ready-to-query data from industry-specific providers.

Achieving SLAs and empowering business users 

Powering Flex’s supply chain analytics with Snowflake makes it easier to consistently achieve data processing SLAs. “We are seeing a 30% to 40% savings in data processing time,” said Flex’s Director of IT, Sudhakar Ramakrishnan.

Architecting a scalable data environment on Snowflake enables Flex’s developers to take on more projects and deliver consumer-friendly data assets that empower analysts across the company. “Teams spend much more time now working with the data, as opposed to looking for it,” said Kevin McCarthy, Flex’s Director of Information Technology.

Granular reporting helps Flex’s leadership team anticipate future costs and measure the business impact of supply chain analytics.

Accelerating innovation with the Data Cloud 

Leveraging Snowflake Secure Data Sharing to increase collaboration with customers and suppliers is a top priority for Flex. According to McCarthy, “We’ve got a big partner ecosystem, and being able to share data with those partners is something that’s very important to us.”

Onboarding additional projects, users, and workloads to Snowflake will help maximize data’s impact at Flex. For example, Flex plans to support its machine learning and advanced analytics workloads with Snowflake. “Being able to develop in these spaces are opportunities that weren’t there before,” McCarthy said.
Learn more about Snowflake’s Data Cloud and Flex.