Shop Floor Data Collection and Machine Monitoring

The problem: production actuals arrive a day late, on paper

Most SAP Business One manufacturers run production issue and receipt from the office. An operator writes start and stop times, quantities good and scrapped, and the reason a machine stood idle on a paper ticket. Someone keys a subset of that into the Production Order hours later, or the next morning. By the time the data lands in SAP B1, the shift is over, the cause of the downtime is a memory, and the scrap has already been swept away.

The result is a Production Order whose Component and Resource lines carry planned quantities dressed up as actuals. Costing runs on estimates. Nobody can answer why Tuesday's output was 18 percent below the schedule, because the only record of Tuesday is a clipboard. Machine availability is a feeling rather than a number, and OEE, if it is calculated at all, is calculated in a spreadsheet from data that never reconciles to the ERP.

SAP Business One has the Production module, Resources, Routings and Resource capacity, but it has no shop floor interface. There is no terminal an operator can use with gloves on, no barcode scan to clock onto an operation, no structured downtime reason code, and no way to read a signal off a machine and turn it into a booking.

What ECOSIRE builds

ECOSIRE builds a shop floor data collection and machine monitoring add-on for your SAP Business One installation. It is not an off-the-shelf download. We scope it against your routings, your work centres and your reason codes, quote a fixed price, then build and install it into your test company database and afterwards into production.

Touch terminal for the workstation

A browser-based operator terminal designed for a shop floor panel PC or tablet: large targets, no keyboard required, barcode and RFID badge input. The operator scans a badge to identify themselves, scans or selects a Production Order and an operation from the routing, and clocks on. Clock off, quantity good, quantity scrapped and a scrap reason are all captured at the point of work. The terminal runs against the Service Layer over HTTPS and holds a local queue so a dropped network connection pauses posting rather than losing the booking.

Real bookings against Production Orders

Every clocked interval becomes a real SAP Business One transaction, not a shadow record. Labour and machine time post against the Production Order Resource lines. Good quantity posts as a Receipt from Production; scrapped quantity is handled by the rule you choose during scoping, whether that is a separate Goods Issue to a scrap warehouse, a rejected quantity on the receipt, or a Goods Receipt to a quarantine Warehouse for later disposition. Component backflush issues the Bill of Materials components from the nominated Warehouse and Bin, honouring batch and serial allocation where those items are managed.

Downtime capture with reason codes

When a resource stops, the operator selects a downtime reason from a configurable list stored in a User Defined Table, with categories that map to the six big losses if you want OEE reporting in that shape. Downtime intervals are held in a User Defined Object with the operator, resource, Production Order, start and end timestamps and free-text notes, so a supervisor can see not only that a machine stopped but why and for how long.

Machine monitoring

Where your machines can emit a signal, we connect to it. That may be an OPC UA server, a Modbus TCP register, an MQTT topic from an existing broker, or a simple digital counter on an IO module. The collector service reads run, stop and cycle-count signals, timestamps them, and either raises an automatic downtime record after a configurable idle threshold or increments produced quantity for the operator to confirm. Machines with no connectivity are still handled through manual terminal entry, so a mixed-age plant works from day one.

Supervisor board and OEE

A live board shows, per work centre, which order is running, who is clocked on, the elapsed and planned time for the current operation, and any open downtime. Availability, performance and quality are computed from your own bookings against the routing standards already in SAP B1, so the numbers reconcile to the ERP rather than diverging from it. Crystal Reports layouts deliver shift, order and resource summaries in the format your production meetings already use.

Built on supported SAP B1 extensibility

The add-on is built as a SAP Business One extension using the Service Layer REST API for transactional posting and the DI API where a specific object requires it. Master data extensions use User Defined Fields on Production Orders, Resources and Business Partners; the shop floor's own records live in User Defined Tables and User Defined Objects so they carry SAP B1 authorisations and can be included in approval procedures. Nothing is written directly to SAP tables with SQL, which keeps the installation supportable and upgrade-safe.

Who this is for

Discrete and process manufacturers already live on SAP Business One who run production orders through defined work centres and want actual labour, actual machine time, actual scrap and actual downtime instead of planned figures. It suits plants with between a handful and a few dozen workstations, where the office is chasing paper tickets and the costing team cannot trust production variances. If you are running make-to-order or make-to-stock with routings maintained in SAP B1, the fit is direct.

How delivery works

Scoping call. We walk your production process: how orders are released, whether operations are sequential or parallel, how you treat scrap, which warehouses and bins components come from, whether batch or serial management is in play, what your downtime reason list should be, and which machines can emit a signal. We look at your existing routings and resources.

Fixed quote. You receive a written scope and a fixed price covering the terminal, the postings, the downtime model, the machine connections in scope, the supervisor board and the reports. Anything outside that scope is priced separately before it is built, never afterwards.

Build. ECOSIRE develops the add-on against your SAP Business One version and database platform. Typical lead time is two to four weeks from confirmed scope, depending on how many machine protocols are in scope.

Install in test. We install into your test company database first, load your reason codes and resource mappings, and run through real orders with your supervisors and a small group of operators. You sign off there before anything touches production.

Install in production. We install into the live company database in a scheduled window, migrate configuration, and stand by for the first shifts.

Support. A support window is included from production go-live, covering defects, configuration questions and operator issues. Extended support and enhancement work are quoted separately.