Plex Systems has added predictive demand forecasting and machine learning to the Plex Supply Chain Planning suite. Plex is a cloud solution that provides integrated supply chain planning and manufacturing execution, enabling collaborative planning that includes suppliers, multi-site production operations, sales and forecasting, and customers.
The Plex Manufacturing Cloud integrates supply chain planning, enterprise resource planning and manufacturing execution into a seamless solution. With Plex, manufacturers can build strategic, data-driven plans that adapt to changes in supply, production, inventory and customer demand.
Users can:
• Sense a change in demand, evaluate multiple alternative responses and coordinate rescheduled production and procurement.
• Communicate a supply disruption and act to reshape demand or redeploy inventory to ensure customer service.
• Support collaborative sales and operations planning based on a single system of record for global demand, supply, inventory, production and cost information.
Building on this connected supply chain solution, Plex is extending regression analysis to continue its efforts to improve demand forecasting. New capabilities will include automated analysis of multiple extended data sets, including Internet of Things (IoT) data, and external inputs such as industry forecasts, social and economic data. New predictive capabilities will help improve the accuracy of demand forecasting, while also streamlining and automating efforts that have traditionally relied on complex, time consuming data collection, spreadsheets and calculations.
Further extending its strategic capabilities, Plex is introducing Machine Learning, initially to automate purchasing and production planning processes. Machine learning is suitable for statistical analysis, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to continuously track and analyze actions and outcomes to improve planning models. The new solution will learn the best approaches to generating a demand plan, improving accuracy with little or no user intervention. Plex machine learning capabilities will also track past buying patterns and apply them to future requisitions based on outcomes.
