66 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine

Tell us about your background and how you decided

to pursue a career in industrial engineering.

Everyone has a unique path in their career. My inspiration started from my

family. My father was the eldest among his siblings, and soon after World

War II, the aftermath was dicult for everybody. He had to stop schooling

intermittently, helping to bring food to the table as well as supporting his

younger siblings. When the family was experiencing nancial hardship

and couldn’t aord school, he often bought limited books and exchanged

could make a living using math skills.

Eventually, I heard about engineering but did not really like big

machines or tiny circuit boards, so I wasn’t attracted to the eld until my

brother pointed out to me that engineering is not just typical mechanical,

electrical or civil, it was more than that. He encouraged me to explore

other engineering elds that dealt with machines and humans. That was

where I discovered industrial engineering and my love for math matched

it. I knew at that moment what I wanted, and the rest was history. This was

how I started my industrial engineering life: from college at Rochester

Institute of Technology, my co-op at HP, my career at Intel and later with

I spent years with Intel gaining a range of vertical experiences, including

industrial engineering, startups and environmental health and safety

(EHS), which allowed me to go in-depth to each core function. With Flex,

I had the opportunity to have a horizontal approach as a manager of a

team of Lean, Six Sigma, industrial engineers and EHS engineers. I took

on the opportunity as I knew it would add into my experience and further

enhance my love for industrial engineering.

Since being at Flex, using industrial engineering practices, we have

delivered our top performance with proper organizational structure

and resources. The majority of the projects completed included traces

Director for Flex. She began her industrial

engineering career at Intel and has practiced Lean

in manufacturing for more than 20 years. She has

held various managerial positions in industrial

and manufacturing engineering, operation and

project teams and served as a senior manager

of Lean and Six Sigma experts at Flex. Her

role as global business excellence director

involves productivity improvement projects

and conducting global technical workshops.

numerous technical articles, conducted

forums and lectures and led workshops on Lean

practices. Sze Yee holds a bachelor’s degree in

industrial engineering from Rochester Institute

of Technology and earned her doctoral degree

in manufacturing engineering from University

Malaysia at Perlis. She lives in Malaysia and is a

senior member of IISE.

To be competitive, the practices of OpEx cannot

resources, and with a light touch of art.

With unique approaches in running the organization,

I was invited to join the plant business excellence team

and later expanded to regional and global business

excellence. The business excellence role provided me

with a more “fun” and “diversied” platform to leverage

my ISE technical expertise and experiences instead

of rigid industrial engineering computations. I was

able to collaborate with dierent departments and

business functions solving diverse types of problems

in our program; for example, project reviews and

documentation, reporting and updating formats, kaizen

workshop protocols, mandatory best practices yokoten,

etc. The highly disciplined execution enables the program

to move fast and deploy with a high penetration rate

and the ability to replicate across the corporation. In

recent years, we have adjusted our program to balance a

systematic approach with exibility. For example:

• We proactively and continuously diversify our

value-added services and programs for our internal

• We organize benchmarking for the Flex Senior

Leadership Team, visiting other companies to

understand their OpEx and digitization programs. We

facilitate Flex Lighthouse Factories with WEF for other

manufacturers to learn from us.

• We designed the program that facilitates Flex

digitization transformation and collaborate with INCIT

(International Centre for Industrial Transformation)

to perform Smart Industry Readiness Index (SIRI)

environment. However, the reality is that manufacturing

has changed. Robots and automation play key roles in

manufacturing, and the work environment is clean, safe

and comfortable. The manufacturing industry is leading

continuous improvement eorts and becoming a place

that provides opportunities to have rsthand experience

in the transformation process, an agent and part of the

solution for intelligent automation, not just a user.

Industry 4.0 has become a buzzword and a trend, but

many companies approach it without proper strategy.

From my experience, we need to understand and

must be from the top to bottom of the hierarchy chain and

end to end across the value stream; OpEx is for everyone.

What qualities does a young ISE need

to succeed in this business climate?

From what I see today, college degree programs are

environment before graduation, which is great. The new

generation is ooded with easily accessible information,

but the authenticity of the information is critical. Young

ISEs need to know how to dierentiate between what is

– Interview by Keith Albertson