Crossroads RMC Shows Off New AI Dashboard at inPOWER 2025
September 22, 2025 Alex Woodie
Crossroads RMC will be showing off its new AI-powered dashboard at Infor’s inPOWER 2025 event this week in Wisconsin. The new offering, dubbed the Next Track Analytics Dashboard, allows users to ask questions about data residing in ERP database using plain English, thereby broadening the availability of actionable information to new groups of users.
Crossroads RMC has built a name for itself within the Infor ERP community thanks to its solutions for manufacturers. The company’s manufacturing execution systems (MES) offering sit comfortably atop ERP LX, M3, and other ERP systems, providing access to shop floor scheduling capabilities that do not exist in the Infor ERP systems.
The Lisle, Illinois, company has also sold a companion product that provides business intelligence and analytic functionality for the MES system. Dubbed the Crossroads Analytics Dashboard, the software helps shopfloor supervisors stay on top of their manufacturing operations by displaying key performance indicators (KPIs) for their business, such as cycle times, equipment effectiveness, downtime, and other metrics.
Crossroads RMC is making some substantial changes to the dashboard, which it is releasing as version 3. For starters, the software was upgraded from using WinForms to using Web-based technology using .NET 4, which allows the dashboard to run on iPads and other mobile devices and also provides greater performance. The name of the software is also changing to the Next Track Analytics Dashboard, to go along with the company’s wider branding around the Next Track name.
The Next Track Analytics Dashboard will feature an AI-powered assistant that lets users chat with their data.
But the bigger change is in the functionality department. Instead of displaying charts and graphs, Crossroad RMC is giving customers the ability to ask questions of their data using natural language query (NLQ). For example, users can ask questions related to shopfloor activities, like “Which machines are down? Which stations are inefficient? Or how is my shift doing?”
While it’s nice to have data presented visually, existing customers have expressed a desire to dig deeper into the data, which is what Crossroads RMC is delivering with Next Track Analytics Dashboard, said Nick Olson, a systems consultant with the company.
“If I’m a shopfloor supervisor, my job is to have my tablet in my hand and look at this screen and gain insight and knowledge from it,” he said. “The natural language conversation with the data is tremendous because now I can gain insights. I’m not just looking at a visualized panel and seeing colors and stuff on it. I’m actually gaining useful insight.”
Crossroads RNC currently has the product set up to use OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 running on Microsoft Azure. However, the company is developing the software to utilize different foundation models.
The company has done quite a bit of work to ensure to data is normalized for SQL access, such as getting date fields in the proper format. It previously has put quite a bit of work into pulling data off the Db2 for i database using the .NET database driver, and it’s utilizing that work now for NLQ on Db2 for i.
“Once we get those queries built, the data sources built, those are what plug into our dashboard layer,” Olson said. “And our dashboards are able to then go ahead and connect to those data sources that we just built and spill the data for us.”
Crossroads RNC developed the Next Track Analytics Dashboard at the request of users who wanted to be able to use AI technology to “talk” to their data. After getting this running for Infor ERP LX and M3 customers, the company would like to expand it out to other Db2 for i users, and other databases too.
While Infor has done a lot to give its IBM i customers development tools, such as the Infor Development Framework (IDF) and Infor OS, it hasn’t matched that pace with its database or AI development efforts, Olson said.
“They’re putting a bunch of AI flavors and data insights and stuff over top of [its cloud suites] but they’re ignoring IBM i database,” Olson said. “They’re ignoring the IBM i ERP. We wanted to jump on that grenade and say, hey, this is a deficiency in that space, let’s fill it. And that was kind of our method behind this madness.”
Beta tests for the Next Track Analytics Dashboard are expected to start shortly, with general availability following by the end of the year. For more information, see www.crossroadsrnc.com.
