Accuride

Accuride Corporation, a Michigan-based manufacturer of steel and aluminum wheels and components for large commercial trucks, operates in a highly competitive market where product quality and safety standards are critical differentiators. The company initially adopted the Plex Systems manufacturing execution system (MES) to pursue ISO-17025 laboratory accreditation — a rigorous certification that validates the technical competence of testing and calibration labs. However, their test labs and product validation workflows remained siloed from core manufacturing operations, limiting visibility and making it difficult to enforce consistent quality standards across facilities without disrupting production.

Accuride expanded its use of the Plex MES platform — part of Rockwell Automation's FactoryTalk Operations Suite — beyond standard shop-floor operations to encompass product testing and validation as an integrated part of the manufacturing process. Leveraging Plex's multi-tenant architecture, each test lab was provisioned with its own specialized routings and non-standard manufacturing process definitions, tailored to lab-specific workflows. This allowed engineering and quality teams to manage test procedures within the same system used for production, without impacting plant operations. The implementation extended MES principles into what had traditionally been treated as a separate engineering domain, creating a unified digital thread from production through validation.

By integrating test lab workflows into the Plex MES, Accuride achieved ISO-17025 certification — validating that its testing and calibration operations meet internationally recognized standards for technical competence. The expanded deployment allowed each lab to operate with purpose-built routings while remaining connected to the broader manufacturing system. Qualitative outcomes included a fundamental shift in how the organization defines manufacturing: product testing and validation are now treated as an extension of production rather than a separate function. This alignment between engineering, quality, and operations reduced process fragmentation and supported Accuride's strategy of competing on warranty reliability and product quality in the commercial truck wheel market.

• ISO-17025 certification can serve as both a compliance goal and a catalyst for broader MES adoption — use the certification process to identify gaps in your quality data infrastructure.
• Multi-tenant MES architectures allow test labs to operate with specialized workflows without requiring a separate system or risking interference with plant operations.
• Redefining 'manufacturing' to include testing and validation creates organizational alignment between engineering and production teams, reducing handoff friction.
• Start with a compliance-driven use case to build internal confidence in the platform before expanding scope to adjacent processes like R&D validation or continuous quality control.
• Commercial truck component manufacturers face warranty liability that makes traceability from production through lab validation a competitive necessity, not just a regulatory checkbox.