Does your organization have its own sustainability commitment or strategy in place?

We don't have much direct impact, but we are looking at a lot of our demand for automation and other sustainability measures that can have downstream impacts from a sustainability perspective. And we are also looking at carbon-aware Kubernetes for scheduling. We’re even trying to figure out maintenance schedules, etc., and do it at the lowest possible time. There are other small things, but the question of how to marry the economics with some sustainable behavior comes up quite a bit.

Sustainability is a hot topic within Flex. I’m not 100% involved in it, but there are parts of it that we can help with. Our sustainability initiatives are driven through our customers and suppliers. Amazon and Microsoft are both customers, and so is Apple; when they're doing their own initiatives, that gets all baked into what we do. How do we deliver? How do we package? What type of packaging material do we use? All that gets baked into our SBOM, so we kind of get pushed towards it either way.

Everything we do is aligned to our customers and suppliers, but we do have a strategy. And we have a homegrown application for keeping track of what every facility is doing, what they're producing, how they're delivering, what their carbon footprint looks like, etc.—all of those metrics that were coming out back when sustainability became a hot topic. We had a true champion at the time who invigorated sustainability within Flex.

In terms of my particular role as I connect the machines, we’re asked to tap into the energy usage of that facility and machine. I don’t do every single one of them. I'm trying to get data out first. And then, I say, "You guys have capacity. You have the capability, and a team at the site. We're going to send you these IoT devices." For example, depending on where you are, our sites are mandated to turn off all electricity at the end of this shift, especially in the Asia region. If we're not at capacity, some of these facilities will say, "If we're going over the weekend and there's nothing being produced, we want everything off. We want to produce no energy usage." I’ll say, “If there's a team in place, here's those IoT devices. Plug them in and we’ll get the data. Once you get the data back, you can monitor yourself."