Tian Yuan Machinery (TYC), a Taiwanese industrial chain maker with more than 70 years of history and customers in over 30 countries, went live on Rockwell Automation’s Plex cloud MES in eight months. Rockwell’s case study calls it the first Plex cloud MES in Taiwan, and the Commercial Times reported the project on Oct. 12. Alongside the MES, TYC switched on Plex quality management, equipment maintenance and mold management on the same platform.
The numbers are the reason it made the news. On-time delivery rose from 80% to over 90%, and first-pass yield at initial inspection rose from 70% to 85%. The Commercial Times adds that work-in-process inventory fell 15% and staff overtime fell 20% as rework dropped. Before the project, TYC ran several legacy shop floor systems, many customized for specific customers, plus paper; that is a familiar picture for a high-mix, low-volume plant with long product lives.
Plex is also spreading through new sales channels in Asia. On Oct. 15, Tokyo-based NS Solutions said it had begun selling Plex in Japan, with services from process design and deployment through training and day-to-day adoption. NS Solutions says it has supported more than 100 MES projects over 20 years. Delivered as software as a service, Plex gets functional updates without a traditional upgrade project, which is part of why an eight-month go-live is possible at all.
In the U.S., equipment maker CNH is attacking a different MES gap: the minutes between a problem on the line and someone acting on it. Technology Record reported on Oct. 12 that CNH runs IGear’s Squeaks platform inside Microsoft Teams. Its nine North American plants generate hundreds of alerts every shift, from quality defects and missing parts to conveyor stoppages, and supervisors used to learn about some only at the end of the shift. Squeaks now routes events such as fluid leaks, torque failures and line stoppages to the right responder with step-by-step guidance, photos and automatic escalation. Four plants use it today, with a wider rollout that could reach more than 30 plants worldwide.
Both stories measure the same thing: how fast a shop floor event turns into a decision on the job. TYC got there by replacing fragmented systems with one platform; CNH got there by sending events into the chat tool people already use. A fair test for any buyer is to ask where the record of an event ends up. If the torque failure, the photo and the fix live in a chat thread, someone still has to copy them onto the serial number, the nonconformance and the cost of the unit.
N23D is building its MES in Rust around that one record. A floor event such as a torque failure is designed to be a record on the operation itself, carrying the serial, work center and part revision from PLM, with escalation timers that run in the MES rather than in a chat app. When the event becomes a defect, it opens the QMS nonconformance directly, and its rework time lands in ERP job cost without re-keying.
Sources
- TYC Implements Plex to New Phase of Digital Transformation, Rockwell Automation case study (Sept. 11, 2026)
- 洛克威爾攜手天源義記 打造首例Plex雲端示範場域 (Rockwell and TYC build the first Plex cloud showcase), Commercial Times / China Times (Oct. 12, 2026)
- NS Solutions launches sales of Rockwell Automation’s PLEX cloud MES, IBTimes Japan (Oct. 15, 2026)
- CNH uses IGear’s Squeaks within Microsoft Teams to resolve factory-floor issues, Technology Record (Oct. 12, 2026)
Featured photo: Roller chain by Knightrider1uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
