The 2024 Industry Leader Impact Award: Plex & Flex Working Together for Success in the Automotive Industry

Plex Team

February 24, 2025

Flex’s automotive business started their Plex journey in 2010. With 14 years of being a Plex customer under their belt, Flex’s automotive business group has utilized Plex ERP, along with Plex MES, across four automotive manufacturing facilities located in Costa Rica, Mexico, Michigan, and China – their success leveraging Plex all around the world is part of why they are this year’s 2024 Industry Leader Impact Award winner.

Plex’s annual Impact Awards recognize customers who are distinctly committed to digitally transforming and reimagining their operations. For this year’s award programming, Flex’s automotive business group has been recognized for their industry leading practices.

About Flex’s Automative Business

For more than 50 years, Flex has served as an end-to-end manufacturing partner dedicated to helping market-leading brands across diverse industries design, build, deliver, and manage products. Flex supports their customers’ entire product lifecycles with leading product design and engineering, supply chain, manufacturing, post- production, and post-sale capabilities in every major region. The company’s automotive business group provides a unique set of capabilities for the next generation of mobility, including product design capabilities and development platforms to accelerate power and compute innovation. With a footprint of more than 30 sites located in over 15 countries, Flex’s automotive business enables customers to create resilience and agility through its global scale and regional capabilities.

The Plex Piece of the Puzzle

When initially migrating to Plex, the automotive team at Flex knew a deep knowledge of the smart manufacturing technology would be beneficial. This was accomplished by making use of Plex educational resources—like Plex bootcamps, webinars, and the Plex Community. This knowledge has been key as the automotive business group continues to use Plex. Due to the breadth of the company’s size and the markets it serves, Flex operates on multiple internal applications, making bringing multiple systems together a complex task. Plex has been integrated within existing applications in the company’s automotive operations, and the business group continues to identify areas Plex can support. Flex’s automotive team has been pleased with this approach— treating Plex as an important piece in a larger puzzle—and the accuracy Plex provides.

Creative Plex Integrations to Lead the Automotive Industry

As mentioned, Flex’s automotive business group has created several integrations using Plex on their plant floor to show different dashboards, statistics, viewpoints, and information to the plant floor workers. These integrations are advanced and varied, including:

Global inventory overview
Load vs Shipment
Scrap Logs
Production dashboards
Integration with Workday
Raptor integration
Financials & Billing statements

As a result of these dashboards, Plex has provided Flex’s automotive business group instrumental data sources that have informed their operations and opened the door for improvements:

Plex ERP has enabled Flex’s automotive team to speed production time.
The Plex EDI integration provides a secure and friendly way to communicate with both customers and vendors.
Operations have become so streamlined that the company has been able to move parts of their production from one region to another.
Plex QMS encourages continuous improvement and facilitates Flex’s compliance with global standards for proper audit management.
Successfully self-managed transition from Plex Classic screens to Plex UX