It’s not often that CEOs care to disclose insights into their company’s digital transformation strategy. So I was intrigued by the outreach on behalf of Brett Finley, CEO of PLZ Corp., saying that he was willing to be interviewed for an episode of the “Automation World Gets Your Questions Answered” podcast about PLZ’s digital transformation.
PLZ Corp. may not be a household name, but the products they manufacture are. As Finley explained, PLZ produces about two million products each day across 11 facilities for use in your house, on your car, your hair and your skin, as well as in industry. Brand products produced by PLZ include Sprayway, Vegalene, Camie, Penray, Claire and Champion.
Finley explained that the genesis of PLZ’s digital transformation began as part of a strategic initiative in 2024 to modernize the company’s operations.
“We started with two facilities, both in Missouri, that used many manual functions in their production operations,” he said, noting that all of the company’s facilities have “been in operation for decades. None of them are greenfield, with many becoming part of PLZ across 14 different acquisitions.”
Digital transformation goals In PLZ’s digital transformation strategy, four distinct goals were targeted:
- Improving safety.
- Improving product quality.
- Increasing productivity.
- Reducing scrap.
Finley said an overarching goal of these steps is to be able to “fully automate a [production] line that gets to lights out manufacturing [on that line] by 2028.”
He explained that operations teams at PLZ are actively doing the process work of the company’s digital transformation by mapping safety, quality and costs across the company’s operations to give PLZ a road map for “how we think about modernizing and applying that to our digital transformation.”
The role of Ignition in PLZ’s digital transformation
Finley said PLZ uses Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform to automate management of the company’s critical operations data that was previously handled manually.
Key production data aspects now managed with Ignition include:
- Monitoring and tracking tank levels holding different chemicals used in production.
- Gas house monitoring related to charging the aerosol cans containing PLZ products.
- Tracking data captured during water bath testing for DOT compliance.
Essentially, Ignition is used to track upstream, midstream and downstream data in PLZ’s manufacturing process.
“For us, it’s about using Ignition to think about operational efficiencies and be able to gather all [our operational] data in one source, reduce risk to employees, and figure out key areas where we could do more predictive and preventive maintenance,” Finley said, adding that “we’ve always tracked this information, but [before Ignition] we had to access a spreadsheet on somebody's computer or review charts posted on a wall.”
Quality control and compliance tracking
Explaining how PLZ approached the quality control and compliance aspects of its digital transformation, Finley stressed that “you've got to optimize your processes first” and understand that no one technology will address everything for you.
“We spent a tremendous amount of effort and conducted great process work implementing SAP across all of our facilities to centralize all our data. So, now we have SAP as our centralized ERP system. Our quality management system, supported by SAP, helps us centralize all this data to take it from manual and offline systems to online systems so they can be a part of our SAP ERP system to streamline our data connections and eliminate the manual parts of our business.”
This helps us “address quality concerns before they escalate and gets us closer to the goal of having a data-driven decision process,” he added.
Supply chain optimization
Beyond improving specific production operations to ultimately achieve lights out manufacturing with at least one line by 2028, Finley explained how PLZ’s supply chain operations fit within the company’s digital transformation plans.
“With everything going on in the world now, the supply chain is one of the biggest issues for manufacturing,” he said. “And I would also candidly say: It's not like automation or software is going to fix all of this. We just know that the pace and the rate of change is ever increasing and companies that have more access to real time information can win in an environment that’s ever evolving.”
He added that PLZ thinks about the supply chain in terms of accessing more real-time information.
“That’s why we created customer and supplier portals to streamline our connectivity with them,” he said. “A lot of what we do here uses AI-powered, real-time access to information 24 hours a day, because you can't always hold off on making a decision for the next workday or when somebody comes back into the office. Our supply chain operations also rely on insights from our Innovation Center. Since launching this Innovation Center across PLZ, we can now see how best to innovate around alternate processes, supplies and materials as needed. And those insights become even more real when we apply data-driven digital information for decision-making.”
According to PLZ, the Innovation Center serves as a central hub near PLZ's Downers Grove, Ill., corporate headquarters to innovate new products, tweak existing formulations and conduct rigorous testing to meet evolving industry and regulatory standards.
