Smart Craft Cloud MES

Smart Craft Inc. is a Tokyo startup established in June 2021, with a second office at STATION Ai in Nagoya. It builds a cloud manufacturing execution system for small and mid-sized factories that still run production instructions, daily reports and quality records on paper or spreadsheets, and for which a conventional MES is too costly.

Supervisors upload production plans, procedures and drawings, and operators use tablets or smartphones to tap start and stop, record output, defects and reasons, and view documents. Progress against plan is shown in real time and dashboards replace manual report writing. Add-on modules cover AI analysis by natural-language chat, quality inspection records, inventory, Gantt scheduling, lot and serial traceability and IoT machine data collection. It runs on AWS and users include OKI Nextech, Tensho Electric Industries and Nisshin Seiki.

• Work instructions: register plans and attach procedures and drawings for operators on the shop-floor app.
• Result entry: operators tap to record labour hours, output, defects and reasons on mobile devices.
• Progress tracking: real-time view of progress against plan from the office.
• Dashboards and AI analysis: charts from collected data and natural-language queries in a chat window.
• Quality and traceability: digital inspection records and lot or serial tracking of product structure.
• Scheduling, inventory and IoT: Gantt planning, stock management and automatic machine data collection.

A Vietnamese metal processing or plastic moulding SME can replace paper job tickets and daily reports with tablet entry in Vietnamese. A Japanese-invested electronics parts plant can track progress and defects by lot in real time. An auto-parts supplier can add IoT data and lot traceability for customer audits.

The company cites a 78% cut in paperwork management costs, 25% higher production efficiency and 30% shorter manufacturing lead time. Tensho Electric improved productivity by 20% within a year, Nisshin Seiki halved its defect rate and Mitsuboshi Cutlery raised monthly output by more than 10%. The app supports Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Tagalog and other languages for foreign workers.

Small component makers in Japan and their sister plants and suppliers in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia face labour shortages and growing numbers of foreign workers. Low-cost, multilingual cloud MES that runs on tablets lets these factories digitise production records without large IT projects.

Smart Craft Inc. (capital 81.09 million yen) is headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo, with an office in Nagoya. In June 2026 it received investment from Omron Ventures and began a business partnership with Omron to link factory IT and OT data. It holds ISO 27001 (ISMS) certification and releases updates every two weeks.