Food and Beverage Manufacturing

Purpose-Built for Food and Beverage Manufacturers

The Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform aligns to your specific needs, eliminating information silos, digitizing your enterprise, automating processes, enabling tracking from anywhere over any device, and producing actionable data for anyone in your organization.

For food and beverage manufacturers like you, the core value of Plex is in our world-class food safety and quality management system along with our proven MES for managing production batch execution and yield management. Add in advanced supply chain planning that includes sophisticated statistical and collaborative demand forecasting, distribution requirements planning, and advanced MRP, and you’re ready to overcome today’s industry challenges.

Imagine your business with a smart manufacturing foundation that includes automation integration, mobile connectivity, modular solutions and more, all delivered securely and rapidly from the cloud. You’d be able to solve critical business problems rapidly while growing into the future of food manufacturing – and that’s exactly what Plex is designed to do for you.

Designed to address your specific needs:

Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform Features & Benefits

Batch-Oriented MES

Model expected yield losses in detail and report on actual performance in pounds, labor efficiency, and production costs.
Schedule optimal batches in series or in parallel across multiple workcenters with varying capacities.
Schedule pre-process/prep operations tied to specific batches and batch sizes automatically.
Enforce in-process quality control plans to ensure proper stock rotation of perishable products.
Integrate with weigh scales, use configurable container and pallet labeling, and more.
Rely on intuitive, role-specific access through Plex Mobile that simplifies life and provides real-time connectivity to the platform from anywhere, at any time, and on any device.

Automate, Orchestrate, and Understand Your Plant Floor

Connect to the plant edge to control information and processes while adding efficiency, saving cost, and eliminating manual errors.
Connect the plant floor to systems to digitally track production and provide real-time, actionable information and operational KPIs without the complexity of hardware or customized software.
Automate data capture and processes to increase control, gain real-time machine status insights, accurately record production, improve traceability, and execute processes like job setup and lineside labeling with Plex A&O.
Prevent downtime with asset performance management (APM) which helps pinpoint and measure asset performance and machine health.
Extend your capabilities using low-code application building to create custom workflows, content specific visualizations, and solutions that meet localized needs.
Connect to machines seamlessly and access the real-time operational KPIs you need to take control of performance with production monitoring.

World-Class Food Safety & Quality Management

Execute quality checks on any device and see results on a fully digital, single source of the truth.
Depend on process and product quality control capabilities that cover all functional areas from receiving through production and finished goods.
Reduce time responding to mock or actual recalls with powerful lot track and trace, tracing from source to destination or vice versa.
See all customers who received non-conforming lots and inventory at any stage of production.
Handle allergen and country of origin tracking, SPC & problem control, and supplier quality management.
Automate checksheets to collect data from PLCs.
See quick links to maintenance work requests, gauges and tooling, attachments, and quality and HACCP checks within the platform.

Supply Chain Planning

Incorporate advanced requirements planning, statistical forecasting, and demand planning with machine learning into your smart manufacturing foundation.
Connect the top floor with the plant floor and suppliers with customers in a closed-loop planning process.
Leverage sophisticated statistical algorithms to forecast demand based on historical sales data, external feeds like point-of-sale information, and more.
Make collaborative forecast adjustments to reflect information on new programs, customers, products, promos, etc.
Get help with distribution requirements planning in a multi-site network.
Explode material requirements and plan production orders against a rough-cut capacity plan to dynamically calculate reorder points and other planning parameters.
Build plans that lower costs while improving schedule attainment and customer on-time deliveries and satisfaction.

Flexible Deployment Options

Achieve true flexibility with solutions that enable real-time integration and bi-directional communication that must co-exist in a hybrid IT environment.
Enjoy cloud-based architecture coupled with an open integration layer and scalable functionality.
Flexible deployment options from standalone production monitoring or quality/QMS to more comprehensive plant-level MES or enterprise-level ERP, Plex meets manufacturers where they are with solutions for today and that scale for tomorrow.

Built-in EDI and Integrations

Access a robust library of 18 off-the-shelf EDI documents and 112 food industry trading partners.
Benefit from EDI mapping and processing that occurs directly in Plex ERP, resulting in comprehensive error checking.
API library allows you to integrate with external systems such as nutritional labelling, trade promotion management, and transportation management.
Integrate MES, QMS, and other modules to any ERP (SAP, Dynamics, etc.) and to plant floor process control systems.