
in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Operations Platforms For Manufacturing Businesses, Q3 2020.
Create a culture of control and continuous improvement. Plex helps you orchestrate the many moving parts in your production environment for optimal performance.
Plex’s Production Analytics application is designed with operations and plant managers in mind, presenting production, quality, scrap, and plant floor performance metrics and KPIs in an easy-to-read dashboard style user interface.
With these comprehensive and detailed insights, you can monitor plant floor activities through a collection of KPIs including overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), scrap rate, first pass yield, performance, inventory turns, on-time jobs, machine availability, and more.
Plex’s Control Panel allows your operators to see jobs, setups, and quality checksheets all in one interface. Color-coding makes it easy for operators to see which jobs are complete (any tasks highlighted in green) and which remain to be done (those highlighted in red). At the same time, the top floor can quickly see the progress made on the shop floor, in real time and with fewer manual data entry.
Operations are governed by a central control plan that actually manages operational behavior by enforcing production and quality procedures. You can record production and automatically maintain lot control and traceability by automatically depleting source inventory in real-time as it is consumed. Plex’s system automatically generates checksheets as specified by the control plan, which must be completed before an operator can proceed.
Plex allows you to maintain a work center list showing single machines, work cells, or designated areas where work is performed by hand. The system is integrated with production tracking, scheduling, capacity planning, preventative maintenance, equipment lists, and many other modules.
You can capture events that occur at each work center, including production, setup, maintenance and downtime. Plex allows you to create and maintain a list of standard maintenance, repair and operation (MRO) items such as supplies, tools, materials and services. You can also manage MRO supplies and cost using an electronic check in/check out system to capture usage transactions with barcode scanners. Plex also allows you to automatically requisition and reorder supplies based on frequent use or flexible inventory parameters.
Plex’s helps you define and execute tooling control plans by aligning tool drawing attributes with tool manufacturing processes. You can view all active tool projects by customer and due date and see detailed reports of tools and tool statuses.
Plex’s interface allows external tooling suppliers to log in and directly record tool measurements, dramatically increasing supplier accountability. You can generate automatic subcontractor purchase orders and create receipts using specialized blanket-order pricing based on supplier, surface area, weight, and/or cost per tool. You can also compare actual tool life to standard (expected) life and establish a preventive maintenance schedule for each die (tool set).
"Plex has simplified data gathering and data management at all levels of our enterprise, allowing savings in time and resources."
Arvel Wooten
Organizational Development Specialist, Hatch Stamping
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“All the Plex functions fit together so we get powerful information in real time. We have the Cadillac of presses, and we needed the Cadillac of ERP systems. Our business has grown 17 to 23 percent per year and, thanks to the efficiencies we now have through Plex, we haven’t had to hire anyone outside of production personnel to keep up.”
Jason Howey
President, OKAY Industries
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"The simple fact that our drawings are revision-controlled and available from the Plex control panel, and if any changes are made it’s instantly updated—well, it’s a beautiful thing."
Joshua Hopp
President, HK Metalcraft
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