How Plexus Turned a Complicated Tech Stack with Four Tools into One with Z2

The background

Headquartered in Neenah, Wisconsin, Plexus Corp. is an electronic manufacturing services (EMS) provider that partners with leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the Aerospace/Defense, Healthcare/Life Sciences, and Industrial sectors to design, manufacture and service complex products in demanding regulatory environments. These products range from life-saving medical devices and mission-critical aerospace technology to industrial automation systems and semiconductor capital equipment.

The globally recognized EMS provider employs over 20,000 team members across 27 facilities throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia, all guided by their vision to help create the products that build a better world. While Plexus does not publicly disclose its customers, the company provides solutions to market-leading corporations as well as ambitious smaller firms looking to disrupt their respective industries. In 2025, energy firm GE Vernova honored Plexus with its “Supplier Innovation Award,” recognizing the manufacturer as a strong collaborator and reliable supply chain partner.

The challenge

As the Supply Chain Systems Director at Plexus, Joe LaMalfa is responsible for managing many of the tools used by a team he leads that works at the intersection of IT and supply chain management. These tools help LaMalfa and his colleagues identify and source parts and crosses, assess supply chain risks, and analyze the impact of disruptions in real time. LaMalfa’s second “swim lane,” as he puts it, is using data science and analytics to gain insights into key performance indicators and paths to improving efficiency.

Historically, Plexus relied on four separate software solutions to manage these distinct tasks, utilizing standalone platforms for component searches, sourcing and procurement, risk assessment, and supplier ESG performance evaluation. LaMalfa and his team used all these applications to manage their supply chain risk program, giving it visibility into threats and the power to execute strategic responses during developing crises.

While each tool served a distinct purpose in managing supply chain risk, operating four specialized platforms simultaneously required considerable time and expertise. “We had fragmented data across disparate platforms,” LaMalfa explained. Teams were often navigating different dashboards during projects, and they needed to manually cross-reference information between the applications. These additional processes created unnecessary steps during what were otherwise fast-moving workflows.

Operating multiple software solutions also led to functional specialization. An engineer might be very familiar with the component search tool, while procurement teams spent more time in Plexus’s risk and compliance systems. “Navigation and just understanding where to find information was a barrier that came with having a more complicated tech stack,” LaMalfa said.

During major supply chain disruptions, Plexus teams had to gather insights across multiple applications to evaluate impacted suppliers, trace components to their original manufacturing sites, and identify viable alternative parts. While reasonably effective, toggling between the different platforms and their distinct datasets added more time and complexity to the risk mitigation process.

Recognizing the potential to speed up their response times and strengthen their supply chain risk mitigation efforts, LaMalfa initiated a proactive review of their software. “We’d been getting feedback from other groups within supply chain, saying that there was a desire to simplify our tech stack,” he recalled. “We saw a clear opportunity to simplify those solutions, consolidate our data integration points, and empower our global teams with a single source of truth.”

Along with several colleagues at Plexus, LaMalfa began a formal search for potential replacements to his current software setup. It would be the first step on the company’s path to streamlining its software applications and strengthening its supply chain risk management.

This transition addressed the data fragmentation and usability challenges inherent in managing multiple standalone solutions.

Joe LaMalfa Supply Chain Systems Director, Plexus

The solution

In 2025, LaMalfa and several Plexus teams that included supply chain and IT, quality management, and engineering began the process of evaluating potential alternative solutions. One of the sourcing experts on LaMalfa’s team was familiar with Z2 through a previous role, and suggested the company try it out. Z2 was one of a handful of platforms Plexus assessed during the evaluation process. “We got temporary access to a few Z2 solutions and tested them out,” LaMalfa recalled.

LaMalfa and his colleagues used 15 different criteria to evaluate potential tools (including the four existing ones), factors that included sub-tier visibility, event notifications, ESG data, and data repository. One insight they noted almost immediately was that Z2 had the potential to single-handedly replace all four of their incumbent tools and thus streamline their supply chain workflows. That’s because it provided four of the key capabilities that were currently spread across their existing applications:

• A component search engine

• A large supplier database with risk evaluations

• Multi-tier supply chain mapping

• Real-time risk monitoring

After testing Z2’s tools and their capabilities, LaMalfa realized that the supply chain risk management platform could solve many of the process-oriented issues Plexus had been struggling with. Because Z2’s tools all operated in the same data ecosystem, drawing from the same centralized database, Plexus’s supply chain team would not have to expend their time and bandwidth integrating different sources of information on parts, risks, suppliers, and crosses. Further, they could all be onboarded on Z2’s platform at the same time, resolving the issue of inconsistent software proficiency that had been stymieing the team for years.

Finally, Z2 outperformed the other tools, or matched the highest-performing ones, in a number of key areas:

• Supplier insights

• Electronics sourcing data

• Market intelligence

• Data architecture

• Country of origin (COO) and key trade data

• Part-to-site mapping

Following an intensive search, LaMalfa and Plexus decided that Z2 offered them the best opportunity to address their most significant internal challenges. And because it had component search, market data, supplier profiles, and real-time disruption analysis, among other functionalities, it would be able to replace all four of Plexus’s preexisting tools, while eliminating the headaches he and his team experienced toggling between disparate solutions.

Z2 successfully replaced four separate legacy tools.

Joe LaMalfa Supply Chain Systems Director, Plexus

In the spring of 2026, Plexus officially onboarded five Z2 solutions: Part Risk Manager, Supply Chain Watch, Supplier Insights, Compliance Manager, and Responsible Minerals.

The results

Since bringing on Z2’s tools in early 2026, LaMalfa’s team has streamlined the way they carry out many of their daily and weekly responsibilities.

With the help of Z2, LaMalfa and his colleagues have solved the data fragmentation issues they’d long struggled to overcome. Previously, responding to risk events required team members to manually cross-reference information across separate platforms.

Now in Z2, we have the PLM vault, the geolocating, and the alternates all in one place. It reduces the data fragmentation. It improves the accuracy. It also makes our processes more efficient.

Joe LaMalfa Supply Chain Systems Director, Plexus

Another major way LaMalfa has been able to leverage Z2 is with reactive risk mitigation. Z2’s part-to-site mapping has allowed him and his supply chain colleagues to respond with greater insight and agility to potential disruptions. “Its value really comes out when there’s an earthquake, when there’s a production stoppage, when there’s a strike,” he said.

All that supply chain mapping data has empowered LaMalfa to strengthen his proactive risk mitigation strategies, too. “From the proactive side, the benefit is we’re extracting multiple data points from one source, Z2, for our own internal proactive risk scoring,” he said. “Whereas historically, we would have to go to several different systems and grab different pieces of information and bring it into our own internal tool. Now we’re able to just go to the Z2 API database and get that information. It has simplified our data sources, and we have less integration points.”

We realized significant cost savings as well.

Joe LaMalfa Supply Chain Systems Director, Plexus

It also didn’t hurt that migrating to Z2 resulted in lower software costs for Plexus. Finally, LaMalfa was quick to point out that he’s been impressed with how collaborative and communicative Z2’s customer success team has been with Plexus since the company brought on the software’s various tools. “I’ve worked with a lot of different software providers and having a strong working relationship where the software provider is responsive and follows through and maintains an active line of communication is super important,” he said. “And we’ve been happy with what we’ve seen from Z2.”