How to Automate DELMIAWorks

One database holds the press and the purchase order

An injection molding plant runs at night with most of the lights off. Presses cycle, robots lift parts clear, a silo drops resin, and the difference between a profitable job and a bad one is measured in tenths of a second and in cavities that did or did not fill.

DELMIAWorks is the manufacturing ERP those plants run on. It was IQMS EnterpriseIQ until Dassault Systemes acquired the company and renamed it, and plenty of people on the floor still say IQMS. What makes it unusual is that the shop floor system and the business system share a single database, so the schedule, the inventory, the accounting and what a press is doing right now are one record rather than two systems being reconciled.

Around that sit the modules a mid-market manufacturer would otherwise buy separately: quality, warehouse management, EDI, maintenance, CRM and the accounting.

Resin, tooling and customer releases still land in an inbox

The plant floor reports itself. The supply chain attached to it does not.

A customer without EDI posts its releases on a portal and expects somebody to go and look. A resin supplier's price and lead time move, and the first anyone hears is a quote that no longer works. A mold is being built at a toolmaker two time zones away and status means an email exchange. A truck of resin is somewhere and the carrier's site is the only thing that knows. The customer's own scorecard grades your delivery and your reject rate, and it lives on their portal behind a login somebody set up two years ago.

So a materials planner and a customer service rep spend their mornings the same way: opening sites, writing down what changed, and typing it into a system that already knows everything else.

RealTime monitoring already knows when a press stops

Inside the four walls DELMIAWorks has this covered better than most, and a plant that has not switched all of it on has left the straightforward part undone.

RealTime process monitoring captures data straight off the work centers and feeds it back into the schedule and the inventory as it happens, reporting parts produced, production time, downtime, rejects, cavitation changes and how much is left to run. Preventative maintenance and MRO plans and tracks the work on machines, tools, dies, auxiliary equipment and gauges, which in a molding plant is what keeps a mold PM schedule off a spreadsheet. Quality management handles defect tracking, traceability and audits against the same data. EDI serves the customers set up to exchange documents, and the warehouse system handles what moves.

Each of those reads a machine or a record that belongs to the plant. None of them signs into a customer's portal, a resin supplier's account page or a toolmaker's status site, because those are web pages that open for a person rather than systems waiting to be integrated with.

The supply chain reports in like the presses do

A materials planner's morning could begin with the changes already listed rather than with a list of sites to open.

Customer portals read every morning for new releases, revised quantities and pull-ins, so the accounts that never went to EDI stop being the ones that surprise the schedule. Resin and colorant prices and lead times from each supplier's account page, put next to the jobs quoted at last quarter's number. Inbound carrier tracking on the material, so a scheduler learns on Tuesday that Thursday's run is going to be short.

Then the things that decide next year's work. Customer scorecards collected from their portals, so a slipping delivery rating becomes a line to fix rather than a quote you did not win. Mold build progress gathered from the toolmaker. Secondary operations and regrind vendors chased for return dates. Certificates of insurance and supplier approvals watched for the dates that lapse quietly.

The split is worth stating. Reading portals and assembling the picture runs unattended. Confirming a release, committing a date or answering a customer is a planner's call.

The overnight portal round runs while the presses do

The plant already reports itself overnight. The portals attached to it could be read on the same shift.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in the way your planner is. It opens a customer's portal, a supplier's account page or a carrier's tracking site, reads what is on the screen, and lines it up against the schedule and the inventory DELMIAWorks is already holding.

It runs on a schedule you set, in your own private environment, and a workflow can be held to a named list of domains. Nothing is committed to a customer without a person doing it. Each workflow below names the sites it opens.