ASophia Production is the centre piece of the ASophia MES. It communicates directly with the production equipment and provides the interface with the production operators. Through the ASophia Production interface, operators are able to monitor the progress of the work orders, machine performance and utilization.

At the heart of ASophia Production is the data acquisition engine, DAMAS. DAMAS is capable of acquiring data automatically from production control devices and equipments through custom built I/O managers as well as from a wide variety of data entry devices such as barcode scanners, tag readers etc. It also provides connectivity to industrial networks such as Profibus, Modbus, Ethway etc. ASophia Production is also able to connect to devices such as PLCs through OPC servers.

Through the ASOphia Production Human Machine Interface (HMI), the operator is able to perform all operator functions such as logging in, indicating the start and end of shifts, starting, suspending and ending a production order etc.

ASophia Plan is the link between the ASophia MES and any ERP system. It is used to enter work-orders into the system and export work-order status and raw material information to external systems.

ASophia Plan has several graphical and textual display modes, including a Gantt chart for factory schedulers and planners to make adjustments to work-order schedules. These adjustments are reflected immediately in factory floor dispatch lists enabling factory floor personnel to react in a timely manner to changes in production schedule. It also helps factory personnel to react to unpredictable events that could influence the timely execution of work-orders or the overall plant capacity like for example, the unavailability of certain equipments due to breakdown or other unscheduled activities.

With ASophia Plan, the production scheduler can alter a scheduled start time for a work order by selecting and dragging the work order on a Gantt chart. He or she can change the resource allocation of a work-order by simply dragging and dropping the associated work-order from one resource to another.

For the Production Manager, the Maintenance Manager, and the Plant Manager, ASophia Analyser is the perfect tool for making the right decisions. It is also the perfect tool for data analysis, and display of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

ASophia Analyser can access all vital information related to production including equipment, personnel as well as planning information. ASophia Analyser provides tools for data correlation which facilitates problem identification, root cause analysis, and corrective action. As such, ASophia Analyser enables continuous process improvement.

Customised analysis can be carried out in order to compute indicators such as the production line efficiency, Plant and equipment utilization, productivity etc. The analysis can involve queries, which might involve several pieces of equipment and/or operators over a defined period of time. Graphical representations of these indicators provide the user with a easily understood view of their production operations at any time. They include:

• Trend charts
• Paretos
• Histograms
• Pie charts
• Bar charts

ASophia Configurator is the key differentiator of the ASophia Suite MES. It provides you with a fast track to implementation. No custom software development is required, resulting in significant time savings.

ASophia Configurator is used to describe the production environment to the system including resources, equipments, products, shifts, etc. Configuration is done through “fill-in-the-blank” forms and “drag-and-drop” of pre-defined production objects in a graphical user interface (GUI).

 ASophia Designer, an adjunct module to ASophia Configurator, is used to design the user interfaces in an ASophia suite implementation. Pre-defined indicators (synoptic objects) can be dragged and dropped into a canvas and arranged as desired using ASophia Designer. A wide range of synoptic objects are available, ranging from simple value indicators to trend graphs. They include numerical displays, real-time curves, pie-charts, bar- graphs etc. Synoptic objects can be linked to raw data or derived data and are updated in real time on the user interface.

Product and process specifications with attached bill of materials and required resources are created through easy to use interfaces. Production processes involving multiple steps can be modelled diagrammatically in a flow-chart form. Each process step specification, with associated raw-material, equipment setup, personnel and other requirements are created and maintained in a library. Process step specifications can be reused in any number of process flow specifications. All process specification artefacts (steps and flows) are fully version controlled.

ASophia Report is the reporting module of ASophia Suite.

ASophia Report is a report generation tool which allows the user to extract the relevant information form the production database. It provides the user with the facility to validate the data acquired in real time from the production floor, and calculate and analyse Key Performance Indices (KPI). It also allows the user to consolidate and store this information in a separate reporting database. This database can be used as the source for production dashboards and custom reports using standard tools like Excel, Business Object etc.