Better Inventory and Revenue Insight with Plex ERP

Tech Met Inc., a Pennsylvania-based chemical milling and surface treatment company serving aerospace and medical markets, had outgrown its paper-based operations. The legacy system provided no real-time data, generating frequent reporting inaccuracies that caused production supervisors to be told materials were in stock when they weren't — leading to delays and eroded trust across departments. With thousands of customer parts flowing through the facility and a regulatory requirement to retain production and quality documents for up to 30 years, managing documentation across spreadsheets and off-site storage had become operationally unsustainable. Invoicing lagged by over a month after production closeout, directly delaying revenue realization.

After evaluating multiple ERP platforms, Tech Met selected Plex ERP — part of Rockwell Automation's FactoryTalk suite — based on its cloud-native architecture and hands-on implementation approach. Rockwell Automation System Integrator Control+M Solutions played a central role, running demos and guiding the deployment to fit Tech Met's existing infrastructure. The implementation began in early 2020 but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately going live in October 2023. A key integration decision — migrating over 2,000 part records by transferring production steps in bulk rather than individually — accelerated the rollout. The cloud-based platform centralized inventory, invoicing, and document management into a single system of record accessible from any location.

Following go-live, Tech Met realized measurable improvements in revenue velocity and operational visibility:

• Invoicing cycle reduced from 30+ days to a few days for production closeout
• Customer billing now occurs immediately after shipment, versus more than a week previously
• Production and quality documents — previously scattered across paper files and off-site storage — are now accessible in real time from any location
• Inventory accuracy improved, enabling staff to assign on-hand stock to jobs rather than leaving materials idle

The shift created companywide trust in shared data, including adoption among employees who had been skeptical of the system change.

• Data centralization is a prerequisite for operational trust — siloed spreadsheets and paper records erode confidence in inventory and production status at scale.
• ERP implementations in regulated environments need a long timeline — Tech Met's 3+ year journey from kickoff to go-live included pandemic delays and a document-management move shaped by the regulatory requirement to retain production and quality documents for decades.
• Bulk data migration strategies can unlock stalled implementations — switching from part-by-part to bulk production step transfers was the decision that got the project moving.
• Revenue impact is immediate and measurable — automating invoicing directly shortens cash conversion cycles, making ERP ROI visible within months of go-live.