Plex Insight: Delivering Manufacturing Intelligence

Plex Systems, the leader in cloud ERP for manufacturing, announces the release of Plex Insight, helping manufacturers capture big data and more.

NASHVILLE, TN, June 30, 2015 – Plex, the leader in cloud ERP for manufacturing, today announced Plex Insight, a suite of reporting, analytic and benchmarking capabilities aimed at helping organizations tap into the massive trove of information captured in the manufacturing supply chain and turn that data into actionable manufacturing intelligence.

Gaining Insight from the Plex Manufacturing Cloud

The Plex Manufacturing Cloud connects manufacturers, starting at the machines on the shop floor and extending to materials, suppliers, people, customers and finished goods. That unprecedented connectivity opens the door to a new era of Big Data analytics for manufacturing enterprises. Plex Insight helps organizations translate data into business information with a suite of applications to support everything from increased manufacturing efficiency to financial performance management.

Plex Insight: Delivering Manufacturing Intelligence

Plex Insight includes new products, dashboards, benchmarks and Plex cloud manufacturing platform enhancements including:

• A new generation of IntelliPlex The Plex analytics and reporting application makes it simpler for business users to create drillable reports on any cross-section of data in their Plex environment. Data is organized in intuitive, business-oriented structures; flexible tools make it easy to build, modify and share IntelliPlex reports, while respecting Plex's role-based security. Report templates can also be shared via the Plex Customer Community.
• New role-specific analytic applications Plex is delivering new role-specific analytic applications that feature customizable dashboards to support operational, business and financial decision makers. Business users can drag and drop fields to build advanced data visualizations and standard charts. Plex Financial Analytics and Sales Analytics will be available starting in Fall 2015, with Supply Chain Analytics following in early 2016.
• Plex Machine Performance Powered by Shoplogix, Plex Machine Performance is a powerful shop-floor data analysis and visualization solution. Plant managers can track real-time machine performance and uncover production roadblocks including equipment issues and process inefficiencies, as well as opportunities to improve worker performance and safety.
• A new advanced cloud analytics infrastructure Plex has deployed new cloud manufacturing infrastructure to support dedicated analytics applications and data management, ensuring that even very large datasets can be analyzed and manipulated instantly. 
• Plex Benchmarks More than 400 companies running more than 1,300 facilities around the world make Plex the largest cloud manufacturing community in the world. In the past 12 months, Plex customers ran 41 million quality checks and used nearly 1 trillion pounds of materials. Plex Benchmarks anonymizes and aggregates data from across the cloud to provide organizations with industry-level insight and reference data for key metrics such as inventory write-offs, planning costs and inventory on hand. Plex Benchmarks are currently a Plex Labs project.

Unless otherwise noted, all new capabilities will be delivered during the second-half of 2015.

Comments on the News

"By connecting every aspect of manufacturing, starting on the shop floor, Plex has been doing Big Data since before it was even called Big Data," said Jim Shepherd, vice president of strategy for Plex. "Plex benchmarks leverage the unprecedented breadth and depth of data captured in the cloud to deliver a breakthrough in insight for the manufacturing industry, helping organizations set and achieve new levels of efficiency and performance."         

"Plex captures data wherever it happens across the manufacturing supply chain, and Plex Insight is all about tapping into that vast data resource to give our customers real-time information about their operations, along with rich analysis of their business," said Jerry Foster, chief technology officer for Plex. "The combination of easy-to-use dashboards and flexible tools that enable business users to analyze any of their data instantly is a huge step forward in turning data into manufacturing intelligence."