INVEX Metal Enterprise Software Announces Features for Plate Service Centers

Dallas, TX – INVEX, the cloud-based metal industry enterprise software announces features specific for metal and steel plate service centers and processors. INVEX enables metal and steel plate distributors to quickly take and ship orders with minimal screens and steps.

INVEX is the leading cloud metal enterprise software for the metal industry that is used by metal service centers and distributors. The metal software provides out-of-the-box features for metal companies that carry and process plate products. Common business cases such as plate cutting, oxy cutting, laser cutting, bending, drilling, heat treating, plate rolling, or for outside processes such as heat treatment and Blanchard grinding can be handled quickly and out-of-the-box.

Inventory Control

Plate products can be inventory controlled by Tag, Heat or just a location for added flexibility. Accurate plate remnant diagrams for irregular-shaped plates that remain after processing can be recorded and viewed online in the stock inquiry.

Specifications

For quality, as plates are received, the chemical and mechanical results that can be electronically imported are compared to the industry specifications (ASTM, ASME, MIL) to ensure they are met. Sales can later search stock by these industry specifications, and once sales orders are entered, the reserved stock must meet the customer specifications.

Sales

For Sales, INVEX provides features that allow sales to enter a Quote or Sales Order and choose from a list of custom plate-burned shapes, making it easier and faster to enter the order. Some of these shapes are squares, rectangles, circles, rings, triangles, ring sections, trapezes, or irregular.

Once the shape is entered, INVEX computes the estimated processing time, cost, and charge for plate burning/cutting, to assist the salesperson in providing a final price to the customer.  To account for kerf loss and/or for gross up of weight, INVEX includes several options to use a “gross weight” to calculate the metal selling price. For those companies that grind plates, the gross-up feature can be used to ensure that the weight of the full thickness is used to price the order.

Production

INVEX can handle simple cases such as pick and ship, to plate cutting, or more complex multi-step processing across a single or multiple warehouses including outside processing. The item route handles multiple processing steps that can be performed across warehouses (plants) or to/from outside processors. All transfer requirements are created automatically.

In addition, INVEX allows service centers to record production in real-time directly from workstations in the warehouse with extensive use of bar coding and mobile devices. For plate-cutting jobs that nest multiple items from the same plate, INVEX can pro-rate actual scrap weight based on the estimated scrap weight of each item and pro-rate actual total cutting time using the estimated time for each item.

Plate Nesting

INVEX provides the APIs to integrate with a plate nesting software such as SigmaNEST. Our INVEX Certified Partner ITECH provides a packaged integration with nesting products such as SigmaNEST. This eliminates the need to manually load inventory and new orders into SigmaNEST. In addition, once the nesting process is complete, the integration returns the resulting production job and inventory allocation, from SigmaNEST to INVEX.

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