Plex hosted its annual Future of Manufacturing Roundtable in Michigan last week. I was actually as excited about the past and present of manufacturing I saw during the visit. They hosted a dinner at a Birmingham restaurant which used to be a train depot for the Grand Trunk & Western Railroad. In 1931, when the depot was opened it was at the epicenter of a transformation where the nearby automobile industry was starting to herald the end of golden age of the railroad. The city, a century prior, had dreamed of being an industrial powerhouse like its namesake in England – and along with its neighbors did even better.
The present came in 3 parts. Plex’s Customer Advisory Board meeting was co-mingled with the event. It was invigorating to be with 15 customer executives. They represent a microcosm of the strong economy we are living in: healthy top lines and optimism about US manufacturing, and related PE driven M&A under President Trump, balanced by fretting about confusion caused by his tariffs and a heated labor economy.
Next up was a plant visit at Coastal Automotive in Rochester Hills. Plex has done a nice job over the last few years taking us to plant tours around Michigan. Coastal is a maker of safety, acoustic and energy management solutions (it uses the moniker of “Safe and Sound” ) for automobiles and to a lesser extent to aerospace and sports markets (think NASCAR and high performance helmets). It CNC precision cuts IMPAXX foam and Betafoam AFI – unlike other tours we have taken this one was amazingly quiet and clean. It was quite an education on the material science which results in lightweight, but remarkably strong, energy absorbing composites. In reverse, we found out thanks to an analyst mishap, the densification of the scrap results in a blue rock-like brick you could mistake for an asteroid from planet Pandora.
It was nice to get an update on Plex’s product progress, operations and new executive hires. There are not too many vendor updates these days where you hear of operational features and 5 9s uptime which makes them hesitate to deploy on hyperscale cloud infrastructure providers whose SLAs guarantee 3. I have heard too many vendors and customers say they don’t believe they can deploy manufacturing in the cloud. This was a resounding – oh yeah?
The future also came in three parts. Plex provided more details on its Platform play and IOT efforts. Every SaaS vendor these days has a platform strategy. And everyone glibly talks about how successful the Salesforce strategy has been. After a decade if you look at the function points and vertical extensions its platform partners have delivered, it is actually underwhelming. So, it will be interesting to see how Plex grows the orange portion of this chart.
Same with IOT which builds on their acquisition this summer of Dattus. They acknowledged “it is a crowded landscape with many well-funded niche players”, but “no winners yet”. Jerry Foster, CTO provided an update of work in the labs. They continue to work on wearables (and related noise cancellation) on the shop floor. He also shared details on a machine learning project. Interestingly, it is something they believe they can be used to examine parameter settings across their customer base. Incorrect settings lead to inefficiencies and errors.
I am really pleased to see Ben Stewart has joined Plex as VP of Product Strategy. He has been a Plex customer and partner and should balance out Plex product plans with his field perspective. Also, I hope Chris Bishop who heads services at Plex will find ways to use the ML project to streamline implementation projects and service tickets.
Now about the third part - as we headed back to the airport we drove by Ford facilities and I was reminded of their new commercial “Let the other guys keep dreaming of the future. We’ll be over here building it.”
Another invigorating visit with Plex and its customers.
