TURIN, Italy, May 13 — Hermes Reply, the Reply Group company specialized in digital transformation for manufacturing, presents Brick Cognitive, the new agentic operating system designed to bring AI to the centre of industrial operations. A natural extension of Brick Reply, Reply’s next-generation MES/MOM platform, Brick Cognitive introduces a model in which factory systems no longer simply execute and monitor operations, but is able to interpret what is happening, correlate events and guide action across production, quality, maintenance and planning.
In production environments, data and processes are spread across heterogeneous systems — MES, ERP, IIoT, quality, maintenance and planning — that were designed to operate separately. This creates a fragmented view of operations, makes cross-functional analysis more difficult and slows root cause analysis and decision-making. Brick Cognitive addresses this challenge by introducing a shared cognitive layer that gives manufacturers a coherent view of factory operations.
Rather than adding another analytics layer, Brick Cognitive introduces a new operating model for the factory. At the core of the platform is a semantic knowledge graph that represents the relationships and entities of the production process, including products, machines, materials, events, alarms, production plans and operational constraints. On this foundation, data no longer remains trapped in individual systems, but becomes a source of process understanding and a basis for coordinated action. Within this model, AI agents can interpret performance deviations, correlate non-conformities with process conditions, reconstruct end-to-end traceability, identify recurring patterns of downtime and inefficiency, and assess planning alternatives — enabling manufacturers to move from a fragmented reading of operations to coordinated decisions and actions.
Brick Cognitive is designed as an open cognitive layer above existing factory systems and can operate across heterogeneous environments, including brownfield settings and third-party platforms. At the same time, it represents a natural extension of Brick Reply, expanding the role of Reply’s next-generation MES/MOM platform toward a cognitive manufacturing model.
To make this model immediately deployable, Hermes Reply has developed an initial set of prebuilt manufacturing solutions, including Quality & Traceability Investigation, Manufacturing KPI Advisor and Production Flow Advisor. These applications support progressive adoption across domains, processes and sites. These agentic solutions can analyse material availability to help ensure production continuity, identify planning inconsistencies, reconstruct full product genealogy, correlate quality issues, and surface risks to throughput and performance in live production.
With Brick Cognitive, the factory evolves from a set of systems that execute and monitor into an operating model that is able to understand context, correlate what is happening and guide coordinated decisions and actions across industrial operations.