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Lake Buys ProTrack So Quality Lives Inside the MES

N23D
Lake Buys ProTrack So Quality Lives Inside the MES

The Lake Companies, a Green Bay, Wisconsin, manufacturing software maker founded in 1983, announced on Oct. 2 that it bought the ProTrack quality management system from xR Systems. ProTrack now ships as Quality-Trak inside the Lake MES Platform for manufacturers running Infor SyteLine and CloudSuite Industrial. It covers nonconformance and corrective action, audits, supplier management, document and engineering change orders, and cost of quality, all built natively on SyteLine.

In most plants a nonconformance report lives in a quality tool, the job lives in ERP and the operation lives in the shop floor system. “Quality can no longer live in a silo,” said Lake CEO Chris Orr, calling the result “quality data that moves with the job.” When the nonconformance is attached to the job itself, the scrap and rework land in cost of quality without anyone re-keying them. The joining is not finished: Lake says its next product-to-product link, Shop-Trak with Machine-Trak, is due by the end of 2026, with more through 2027.

A bridge-style coordinate measuring machine with a scanning probe head over a granite table in a metrology room.
A CMM can say a part is out of tolerance in seconds; the hard part is getting that result onto the job, the lot and the cost. Photo: AB Technology (Newark) Ltd., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Octave, the company behind the Reliance quality platform, pushed the same idea outward to suppliers. Its latest Reliance NXG release, covered by Quality Magazine on Oct. 12, ships new Suppliers, Materials and Chemicals and Audits Management applications that run qualification, requalification and supplier audits as one workflow. Audit outcomes and qualification decisions sync automatically to the supplier record, and audit findings route straight into CAPAs, supplier corrective actions and nonconformances.

The release also adds Complaint Intelligence, which writes structured summaries of incoming complaints, finds similar past complaints and related investigations, and gives an AI-assisted read on customer urgency and potential product risk. Smart Search lets users find quality records in everyday language, including across languages for global teams. On the security side, Octave added automated identity lifecycle management, self-service IP-based access controls and multi-factor authentication for supplier and contractor accounts.

A welder in a hood and gloves runs a gas tungsten arc weld on a thick pipe during a welder qualification test.
A qualification test is only useful if its result follows the supplier into every purchase order. Photo: U.S. Army photo by Monique Freemon, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Both announcements wire quality to the record next door: the job in Lake’s case, the supplier in Octave’s. A fair test for any buyer is to follow one nonconformance from the inspection result to the supplier’s corrective action to the cost on the job, without exporting a spreadsheet. If that path runs through an integration between two products, ask who owns the sync when it breaks.

N23D is building QMS on that one record, in Rust. A nonconformance raised at an operation is designed to carry the part revision from PLM, the lot and operation from MES, and its scrap and rework cost into ERP. A supplier’s qualification status sits on the same supplier record that purchasing uses, so a lapsed approval shows up before the order goes out, not at receiving inspection.

Sources

Featured photo: An Army Field Support Battalion-Mannheim quality assurance specialist observes suspension and track upgrades on an M2 Bradley, U.S. Army photo by Kevin Grimm, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.