MILWAUKEE — June 9, 2026 — Rockwell Automation, Inc. (NYSE: ROK), the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, today announced that Gerdau, a Brazil-based leading global steel producer, avoided an estimated $30,000 in development costs and significantly reduced manual quality-control work using Plex Process Flows, a low-code automation capability within the Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform™. The results highlight how manufacturers can unlock meaningful efficiency gains and strengthen quality control without relying on external development resources.
Managing production across multiple disconnected legacy systems had made it difficult for Gerdau's North American special steel division to maintain real-time visibility into orders and inventory, consolidate key performance indicators reporting across plants and build a scalable technology roadmap that evolves with new technologies and supports future automation initiatives.
Gerdau selected the Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform to modernize its operations and unify processes across its special steel division, gaining early benefits in reporting, order and inventory management and custom analytics through Plex’s Structured Query Language environment. The most transformative step came with the adoption of Plex Process Flows, an automation feature within the smart manufacturing platform that enables teams to build sophisticated workflows without software development expertise.
“We can create these automation processes and scripts without having to develop or write any code,” said Joseph DelPup, business analyst, Gerdau Special Steel. “It creates more opportunities for non‑developers to get into automation creation."
Using Process Flows, Gerdau built a scheduled automation that scans newly completed bundles every 15 minutes and automatically places overweight containers on hold before shipment — reducing customer complaints and costly rework. Additional automations streamlined quality workflows, such as automatically updating container statuses for 10 to 30 bundles at a time, significantly reducing manual effort during each review cycle. The team also used Process Flows to replicate a work-request copying feature in-house, saving an estimated $30,000 in custom engineering costs.
"Plex Process Flows was designed to put automation capability directly in the hands of the people closest to the work, and Gerdau is a compelling example of what that looks like in practice," said Devin Burke, group product manager, Rockwell Automation. "Processes that once demanded constant manual attention now run continuously in the background, reducing human error and freeing teams to focus on higher-value improvements."
Gerdau’s creative use of Plex Process Flows demonstrates how manufacturers can unlock meaningful efficiency gains and quality improvements with the right digital tools.
Read the full case study here. Learn more about the Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform here.
