Plex Systems released Tuesday its Plex Industrial IoT, a suite of solutions designed to solve business challenges generating from the shop floor. With Plex Industrial IoT, users can connect machines to the cloud, manages the resulting data streams, and contextualizes the information in real time.
The first available offering will focus on asset performance management (APM), helping companies avoid manufacturing disruption caused by common problems like unplanned downtime, diminished machine performance, and substandard quality output.
Plex’s solution enables manufacturers to implement and leverage connectivity in the era of Industry 4.0, breaking down siloes created by varying protocols and data types used by equipment and sensors by simplifying the connection to machines and the contextualization of data. Plex Industrial IoT grants access to the underlying machine intelligence, delivering to manufacturers timely and accurate insight in a single solution, eliminating operational surprises.
Plex IIoT presents a highly visual, historical view of any asset in any facility to help operators and supervisors visualize trends graphically from anywhere in the world on any connected device. Enable employees to see issues they could never see before, and respond before issues happen.
Plex Industrial IoT focuses on asset performance management (APM), starting with an understanding of current and historical activity. This real-time assessment empowers shift supervisors and plant managers with the data to understand behaviors, trends, and diagnose root cause of common challenges like machine failures, efficiency dips or substandard quality output.
Plex Industrial IoT helps manufacturers monitor what is happening with any asset, in any facility, from any connected device with comprehensive pre-built dashboards. Customizable and real time, these dashboards deliver access to up-to-the-minute metrics and analytics. The information delivered by the dashboard enables manufacturing leaders to respond to live data immediately and accurately to improve operator performance or overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) mid-shift.
The offering improves connectivity to monitor shop floor work cells, machines and other assets; deliver increased visibility through industry standard sensors to monitor virtually any asset’s performance characteristics; and diagnose events and speed response time to potential issues before they happen by visualizing performance trends graphically. It also enables remote operations management with untethered access from any connected device from anywhere in the world; provide increased opportunities for improvement by bringing historical equipment activity into view, and make better, data-driven decisions with a historical view of asset performance.
Data collected over time with Plex Industrial IoT, analyzed against historical trends and contextualized against MES and ERP data from the same facilities, will expose an unprecedented quality of shop floor to top floor insights. This reduces operational disruptions to help manufacturers better plan for the previously unanticipated.
“Plex Industrial IoT will provide us a direct view into the status and overall performance of assets, and we are really excited about the ability to tie quality and part-level performance expectations to asset performance—information that has traditionally been extremely difficult to generate,” said Bob Bierwagen, vice president of digital strategy, MPI Corporation. “With this information available we can both correlate data—as well as understand causality in order to make the operational improvements that will positively impact our bottom line.”
Plex Industrial IoT will be available in July 2019. This is Plex’s initial Industrial IoT offering following the acquisition of IIoT vendor DATTUS in July 2018. Future releases will focus on part quality and manufacturing efficiency.
