28 questions manufacturers ask, including the uncomfortable ones

No. The Lake MES Platform extends SyteLine, it does not replace it. SyteLine stays your system of record and does not change. The platform is the system of execution.

The shop-floor platform for SyteLine manufacturers: labor and execution, documents, analytics and planning, machine intelligence, quality and change management, and a command center over all of it, sold as one subscription and built for Infor SyteLine and CloudSuite Industrial.

The Lake MES Platform is available now and grows with every release. Shop-Trak, Doc-Trak, Fact-Trak, Machine-Trak and Quality-Trak are available today. Vantage is expected early 2027.

Shop-Trak, Doc-Trak and Fact-Trak already work on your SyteLine data today. The next direct product-to-product integration, Shop-Trak and Machine-Trak, is expected by the end of 2026, with more through 2027. Shop-Trak and Quality-Trak working together on the job is planned 2027.

No. Start where it hurts most: labor, documents, machines or quality. Your tier includes a license for each of its products, with starter quantities included, and you install what you need. The next product starts as a pilot on one cell, not a purchase, and you add capacity when the evidence is in. Capacity scales, capability activates.

Yes. Quality-Trak is the quality and change capability and it is available now. It covers nonconformance, corrective action, engineering change, deviations, inspections and audits inside SyteLine, so there is no second set of master data to keep in step. It does not include calibration or gage management.

Process manufacturers. Discrete manufacturers on an ERP other than SyteLine or CloudSuite Industrial. And anyone who wants a single point tool and expects it to stay that way. Everything Lake builds works on SyteLine's data, and that depth is exactly what makes it non-portable.

Each product page carries the full four-page brochure as a PDF, and the platform overview brochure is on the brochures page. The brochures and this site are built from the same source, so they say the same thing.

Both. Every released platform product works with SyteLine on premise and with Infor's multi-tenant cloud. Two prerequisites are named up front: Machine-Trak needs an on-premises collector to read your machines, because your machines are on your network, and Fact-Trak on CloudSuite Industrial requires Infor's data streaming pipelines. Moving to Infor's multi-tenant cloud? The platform moves with you. Your account team will confirm what your version supports.

The minimum SyteLine version for every platform product is SyteLine 9, Quality-Trak included. Shop-Trak 2023 covers SyteLine 9; Shop-Trak 2026 runs on SyteLine and CloudSuite Industrial 2025.07 and later. Your account team will confirm what your version supports.

Any asset. Modern controls connect over standard protocols. Older non-PC controls connect through a digital interface that needs three signals: power on, in cycle, in alert. Presses, weld cells, ovens and paint lines are all in scope.

Nowhere you did not send it. The intelligence layer reads SyteLine through a read-only role, never writes to it, keeps no copy of your database anywhere else, and never uses your data as training data. Today Lake provides and maintains the model access; customer-owned keys and a model running inside your own environment are a later phase and are not available yet.

Higher than most vendors are willing to state. The design position is a confidence floor and an explicit refusal to answer when the evidence is not there, rather than a plausible guess. A wrong answer delivered confidently is worse than no answer.

Thirty to 120 days for one capability. Six to nine months for the full platform across three phases. The range is driven by data quality and operator adoption, not by the software install.

Phase one is mostly yours. Routings, work centers and standards have to be reconciled against what the floor actually does, and no software can do that for you. Lake brings the method, the validation routines and an honest list of what is wrong. If a vendor tells you this phase is theirs, ask who is going to sit with your supervisors.

Lake, for anything in the platform. Every Lake product is built and supported by The Lake Companies, and support runs through one portal for every inquiry, however many products you run. Your SyteLine itself stays with Infor and your Infor partner, and for most Lake customers that partner is also Lake. Call (920) 406-3030 or use the support portal.

Yes, and most shops should. Machine types matter more than machine count, so a pilot that covers two or three different control generations tells you more than ten of the same machine. The Machine-Trak licenses included in your tier are the place to start: Lake installs them, you pay nothing if you decide not to use them, and connections may require a setup fee.

It is the real problem, and it is more common than not. Getting current is a services conversation before it is a platform conversation, and anyone who skips past it is selling you a project that will stall.

Feature by feature there is real overlap, and we say so where Infor's product is the stronger choice. The difference is how many products you have to own to get the whole job, and how well each one fits the ERP you run. Every Lake product is built for SyteLine only, on the SyteLine database, and the links between them are Lake's work rather than yours. Each SyteLine release is tested by Lake, then the platform release follows.

Maybe you should not, yet. The question to ask is what that tool tells you about a job's margin. If machine time cannot meet the operator, the quote and the quality cost on one record, you have utilization but you do not have profitability. On the platform that meeting point is the Shop-Trak and Machine-Trak link, expected by the end of 2026, and until then Machine-Trak already gives you measured utilization by cell, with the lost time behind it and a cost on machine time by asset.

It is MES for SyteLine: the manufacturing operations management functions performed on the SyteLine record you already run, rather than in a second system beside it. A full MES suite is built to be the system of record for production, which means two systems end up believing they own the work order. This platform performs those functions on the SyteLine job, and it names the functions it does not perform yet, maintenance management first among them.

Lake does not publish prices. The platform comes in four tiers, Entry, Essential and Pro, plus Custom, priced for your operation. Pro adds full Fact-Trak, and Vantage is included in every tier. Your account team sizes the platform with you and confirms the numbers in a written quote. Current Lake customers receive loyalty pricing on the platform.

Lake places each customer on the platform tier that fits what it owns today, and the platform subscription is sent as part of the renewal. Each customer moves at its renewal, starting January 1, 2027, and can move sooner through December 31, 2026. Your account team handles questions, early moves and exceptions. Current Lake customers receive loyalty pricing on the platform.

It is, and it is a fair question rather than an obstacle. On the platform Shop-Trak is licensed per named device, Doc-Trak per user, Quality-Trak per workflow seat, Machine-Trak per machine and Fact-Trak per site. Concurrent licensing is being sunset: concurrent devices convert to named devices at a published 4:1 ratio with a usage audit, and an account whose actual ratio is higher gets a discussion and a joint decision, not an imposed number. Ask about it in the first conversation and get it in writing with the quote.

Published at lakeco.com/legal/platform-terms, with a PDF download and every prior version kept available. Every customer document that references the Terms uses that address.

Both, deliberately, and the provenance of every component is a fair question to ask. Machine-Trak came in as Freedom IoT and Quality-Trak as ProTrack, both acquired in 2026, and both are brought onto the platform rather than bolted to the side of it. Anything acquired gets the same treatment or it does not ship.

Backed by a permanent hold software owner. Acquisitions closed rather than promised, releases monthly, and a roadmap published with horizons rather than with dates it cannot keep. Ask about any component's provenance and you will get an answer.

No. If you run any Lake product today you already own the first piece of the platform. Everything you own is carried onto the platform, on the same install and with the same data, and the products you do not own yet are included with starter quantities. Nothing is reinstalled.