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41 Avon Gear Co. (Shelby Township, MI), a machining supplier to the heavy equip- ment industries, has been using the module January 2014. This complements PMC, which Avon Gear has been using since 2007, when the company had $7-million in annual sales. Today, its annual sales are $40-million. The company works on approximately 600 part numbers across over 100 workcenters. Many of the parts require multiple operations, including turning and drilling on-site; broaching, heat treating, and plating of-site; then back on-site for more part turning, grinding, balancing, and other fnal operations. Manually, fnite scheduling took a lot of man-hours, explains Geof Pitts, Avon Gear's production control manager. Now with the Plex module, "you basically hit a button and it'll run through your jobs and schedule them in the appropriate workcenters and give the best start dates—taking into consideration work- center capacity, manpower, and material availability." Only one person schedules jobs now at Avon Gear, instead of 3 to 5 people. And those other people? "Now they're expeditors, chasing parts down, calling people, getting parts back. More value-added work." SMART AND INTELLIGENT Delivered in 2013, SmartPlex, geared for the front ofce, makes PMC accessible from iOS and Android smartphones and tablet computers, putting ERP literally in the hands of a company's business and operations management anywhere, anytime. IntelliPlex, a set of business intelligence (BI) capabilities that work throughout the PMC, has also been available for about a year. IntelliPlex runs "analytics against the 'house' data we collect in the 5,500-plus tables where we store data," says Prater. However, IntelliPlex has generally been for desk- tops and tablet computers. Not anymore. By coupling SmartPlex and IntelliPlex more closely, Plex's BI capabilities now go beyond the desktop-only Plex user interface that could only run in the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. SmartPlex now serves all Plex users— from front ofce to manufacturing, warehouse, and sales. The user interface has morphed from mostly menus to one that displays dashboards, role- based menus with notifcations and document review and approval, and the IntelliPlex BI portal, which makes ad-hoc, on-line data analysis possible. Note that SmartPlex ofers both the new and the "classic" (i.e., menu-driven) user interface to customers. Also, even Prater admits that "looking at a report from your phone is painful, to say the least. From your tablet, you can at least log-in and see all your dashboards quickly and easily." Plex has also announced globalization add-ons that ofer country-specifc reports (such as VAT calculation for EMEA and Brazil tax calculations), nine languages, and foreign currency displays. IN-YOUR-EYE ERP By integrating its ERP system to Google Glass, Plex believes the combination might wind up being "a huge oppor- tunity for wearable computing in manu- facturing," according to Prater. It will let people "interact with technology without using their hands." Specifcally, users will be able to interact with the real-time, transactional materials, manufacturing, and fnancial information captured by ERP. Sure, points out Prater, "you could put an iPad on a forklift, but if you drop it, you end up with a nice piece of broken glass." And a nice bill: industrial- ized tablet computers start at $3,500. Granted, Google Glass is expensive, too; currently costing about $2,000 each. However, when it comes to keeping hands free for safety reasons, points out Prater, "safety incidents can cost millions to a company, as well as timely delays." In use, the wearer of the glasses need only say "Go to Plex" or make a quick hand gesture to initiate and drill through the menus of tasks available through Plex via Glass. As needed, Glass can recognize workcenters, material bins, and any other items having a bar code label. Once Glass reads that label, PMC displays information about that item, such as a workcenter status and the currently running job, or enters the relevant data about that item into PMC, such as a bin's material quantity and inventory deduct. Prater admits the screen in Google Glass is small, so "it's hard to do anything com- plex." However, that's not stopped some customer pilots using PMC and Glass for inventory tracking and control. t Plex Finite Scheduling provides all sorts of details about jobs. This display details the delays—the resource overloads—for a specifc job. These details include the job sequence number, the bottleneck (i.e., the workcenter), and the delay time.