en.Wedoany.com Reported - Rockwell Automation, Inc. announced that Gerdau, a leading global steel producer based in Brazil, has avoided approximately $30,000 in development costs and significantly reduced manual quality control efforts through Plex Process Flows, a low-code automation feature within its Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform. This achievement demonstrates how manufacturers can enhance efficiency and strengthen quality control without relying on external development resources.

Previously, Gerdau's North America Special Steel division managed production across multiple disconnected legacy systems, making it difficult to track orders and inventory in real time, consolidate key performance indicator reports across plants, and lacked a scalable technology roadmap compatible with new technologies and future automation plans.

To modernize operations and unify processes across its Special Steel division, Gerdau chose the Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform. The platform's Structured Query Language (SQL) environment provided early gains in reporting, order and inventory management, and custom analytics. The most transformative step was adopting Plex Process Flows, an automation feature within the platform that enables teams to build complex workflows without software development expertise.

"We can create these automated processes and scripts without having to develop or write any code," said Joseph DelPup, Business Analyst at Gerdau Special Steel. "This opens up more opportunities for non-developers to enter the automation creation space."

Using Process Flows, Gerdau built a timed automation program that scans for newly completed steel bundles every 15 minutes and automatically places overweight containers on hold before shipment, reducing customer complaints and costly rework. Other automated processes streamlined quality workflows, such as automatically updating container status for 10 to 30 steel bundles per cycle, significantly reducing manual work in each review period. The team also used Process Flows to replicate a work request duplication function internally, saving approximately $30,000 in custom engineering costs.

"Plex Process Flows is designed to put automation capabilities directly into the hands of the people closest to the work, and Gerdau is a compelling case study," said Devin Burke, Product Manager at Rockwell Automation. "Processes that once required constant manual attention now run continuously in the background, reducing human error and freeing up team focus for higher-value improvements."

Gerdau's creative use of Plex Process Flows demonstrates how manufacturers can leverage the right digital tools to achieve meaningful efficiency gains and quality improvements.

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