Production orders, OEE, downtime reasons, first pass yield and batch traceability, taken from the machines that report and the benches that never could.
The category
A manufacturing execution system (MES) is the software that runs the plant floor between the order and the finished unit. It holds the production order, sequences the work across stations, records what each one actually produced, and closes the order with real numbers.
The line between an MES and an ERP is worth drawing clearly. The ERP plans and settles: the order, the bill of materials, the cost, the invoice. It knows a thousand units are due Thursday. The MES executes, and it is the only system that knows station four is forty units behind and that the reason is a die change that ran ninety-six minutes against a standard of sixty.
The gap
The plan says the order finishes Thursday, and the only way to check is to walk the floor.
Scrap gets counted at the end of the run, when it is too late to do anything about it.
A material batch turns out bad and nobody can say which finished units it went into.
Two shifts report the same line differently, and both sets of numbers reach the same meeting.
If two or more of those sound familiar, the problem is rarely the plan. It is that nothing is recording what the floor actually did while it was doing it.
Capabilities
Nine areas, grouped around the way a shift actually runs instead of around a list of modules.
The order broken into its operations, each one showing what has been made against what was planned. When the projected finish drifts past the due date, that shows up while there is still time to move something rather than at the end of the shift.
One OEE number tells you something is wrong and nothing about where. Splitting it tells you the line is available and running to rate, and losing points on quality. Built from the records the line already produces rather than a figure assembled once a week.
Reasons coded at the line while the operator still remembers, ranked by hours rather than by how often they get mentioned in the morning meeting. Changeover overrun and material not at the line usually beat breakdowns, and usually surprise people.
First pass yield per product and per line, with the events that moved it marked on the same timeline. A new die, a different coil supplier or a new operator on nights all show up as a step in the trend instead of a rumour.
Material lots tied to the orders that consumed them and the serial numbers that came out. When a coating batch turns out bad, the question is which twenty-two units to recall rather than which nine hundred.
Every changeover timed against the standard, so the ones that consistently overrun become visible. This is the single largest source of lost hours in most plants and the least often measured.
Work in progress by station, so a queue building in front of one machine is something you see forming rather than something you discover when the next station runs dry.
In-process inspections, first-off approvals and safety checks captured at the station. The audit trail builds itself while the order runs, so nobody has to assemble it the week before the audit.
SAP, Oracle, Priority and Infor stay your system of record. Opsima reads the order and the bill of materials from them and writes back what was actually produced, consumed and scrapped. IT reviews and signs off the rollout in staging before it goes live.
The difference
Every MES on the market handles a connected line well. The PLC reports a count, the system stores it, the dashboard draws the chart. That has been solved for years, and it is why MES demos always look convincing.
Real plants are mixed. A press from 2003 with no network port. A bench where two people assemble sub-units by hand. A rework station that exists because somebody set it up during a bad month and it never went away. A quality check that happens on a clipboard because the gauge is not connected to anything. None of those report, and together they account for a large share of the hours the order took.
Opsima captures those steps through the channels operators already use and writes them onto the same order record as the machine data. That is why the projected finish stops being a guess, and why an order that ran through three unconnected stations still ends up with a complete history.
In the field
That is a terminal rather than a plant, and the mechanism is the same one an MES needs: the work was always happening, and the record was not. Taavura's Earth Moving Division runs the same layer across quarries and infrastructure sites, after ERP integrations had already failed to stick with field crews.
Delivery
Your existing MES stays the system of record for the lines it already covers. Opsima adds capture at the stations that were never wired in and reporting that reads across all of them at once. Nothing gets ripped out, and IT reviews and signs off the rollout in staging before it goes live.
When the platform is the thing holding you back, expensive to change and unable to describe how you actually make things, Opsima builds the replacement around your routings and your stations. It runs on your servers or ours. Working software ships in weeks, and you pay once it earns its place.
Goes deeper
Every category Opsima builds, and how MES fits alongside them.
The machines the line runs on, and what they cost to keep.
Fixing on condition, before the line stops for it.
SAP, Oracle, PLCs, SCADA and the rest of your systems.
FAQ
Bring one order type where the finish date is always a guess. We build it on your real data and run it with you. You pay only after it goes live.