Delivering ERP functionality that puts you ahead of the competition: Plex Systems

Continuous innovation still serves as the foundation of Plex solutions today.” – Jerry Foster, Co-founder, Plex

Plex was born on the shop floor of a factory making axles, pinion gears and drive shafts. Its founders are the workers who kept the presses running and made sure parts matched customer specs. Frustrated with inaccurate inventory, machine breakdowns and even making the wrong parts, they built Plex to make the plant run better. The Plex Manufacturing Cloud now connects every manufacturing operation in the cloud for maximum efficiency, productivity and visibility, while supporting continuous innovation.

Starting with automotive metal forming in 2001, Plex rapidly expanded to support a wide range of discrete manufacturing operations across many industries. It later added process manufacturing capabilities, targeted specifically at food and beverage producers. Plex now supports more than 400 organizations and 1,300 production facilities in 20 countries around the world.

Why Plex Technology?

Secure: With the Plex Manufacturing Cloud, you get enterprise-class security at a low, predictable cost. You can trust that your data is safe — monitoring users and activity across your entire enterprise from a single location.

Available: Plex delivers 99.985% uptime — meeting or exceeding the service levels of the internal IT departments at most organizations. Its 95% renewal rate demonstrates that it delivers the availability and reliability its customers demand.

Scalable: Never worry again about the database capacity, number of users, adding another plant or how much storage or computing power you’ll need. The Plex Manufacturing Cloud is infinitely scalable — expanding as needed while you let Plex handle the IT infrastructure.

State-of-the-Art: The Plex ERP technologies are built from the plant floor up to take maximum advantage of cloud computing. Thanks to its state-of-the-art multi-tenant model, clients can run the ERP operations on an affordable, scalable platform that delivers continuous innovation.

Success Story of a Happy Customer

EaglePicher Technologies is a battery manufacturer for the aerospace, defense, and medical industries. It is the AS9100 and ISO-certified manufacturing company, a major provider of the US missile market. Eagle Picher chose to implement Plex Online for much of the same reason most manufacturing companies implement an ERP system, and that’s because it had multiple software programs, spreadsheets, other types of business software trying to run its business and it was not productive or efficient.

In conversation: “Using Plex has allowed us to move from the area where we have multiple spreadsheets and a lot of different functional areas trying to come together as a single entity to represent a quality management system. We were just unable to do that well; took a lot of extra time until we started using Plex.

 Like other defense contractors, we’re faced with DCEA audits. Being an integrated system, we manage all of our financial information, our program information, our jobs information, individual jobs, sales orders; everything related to that program is integrated into the Plex system.

Prior to Plex, it was very stressful for us to complete an audit because we spent so much time and energy just getting the data we needed to answer the questions. Now what we’re able to do is bring the auditors into a room and pull up a screen like the one behind me. We no longer take time to go gather data, to look at where our records might be for training or for traceability; it’s all right in Plex.

I think over the last 7 years, Plex has been instrumental in helping us track all of our requirements, whether it be CDRL submissions or other submissions. Previously that we were very limited on what we could track in the system that we had, whether it be International Traffic & Arms Regulations or the export of administration regulations through the Department of Commerce. Through working with Plex, they were actually able to help us in making sure that we’re tracking the correct deliverables, the technical data, the hardware deliveries that are required under International Traffic & Arms Regulations or the Export Administration Regulations. Again, I think this system’s been very, very beneficial for us.

Another great benefit of Plex is the ability to have a full-blown ERP system, and to be able to manage and support that system with the minimal staff. It’s currently just myself and 4 other staff members that manage all the implementation, development, and support of the entire Plex system. We have 7 locations and over 800 users. To be able to support an entire ERP system with that small a staff is typically unheard of.

We now have the ability to have all of the necessary data that represents a healthy quality system with objective evidence, records all in one place that are connected so that the smooth flow of this information is readily available and the traceability is unmatched in anything we’ve been able to do before we used Plex.

Meet the Master

Jason Blessing, CEO: Jason serves as chief executive officer of Plex Systems and is a member of the company’s Board of Directors.  Jason joined Plex from Oracle, where he was senior vice president of Talent Management Cloud Applications. He joined Oracle in 2011 through the acquisition of Taleo, a pioneer in cloud software. Jason founded Taleo’s small and medium-sized business (SMB) unit, where he had global responsibility for sales, marketing, product development and services. During his tenure, Taleo’s SMB products were a major contributor to the company’s growth as the company became the undisputed market leader with more than 4,500 customers worldwide. Prior to the Oracle acquisition, Jason also served as Taleo’s executive vice president of Products and Technology, where he led the company’s product strategy, product management, engineering and cloud services.

Previously, Jason held a variety of executive positions at PeopleSoft, Oracle and Price Waterhouse. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Founded by factory workers to improve manufacturing, Plex maintains a singular focus on your plant’s success.”