Asprova Corporation was founded in 1994 as the first company in Japan to specialize in production scheduling software. Since then, we have continued to focus solely on the development and sales of the production scheduling software Asprova. I am pleased to say that Asprova has been implemented now in over 900 factories worldwide. Among these stand out cases of companies buying one license at first, and then going on to deploy Asprova in one factory after another after confirming the benefits of the first implementation. In one case, a single company has deployed over 40 licenses of Asprova. This overwhelming number of users is proof of the value of visual management, inventory reduction, lead time shortening, lateness reduction, and other benefits of implementing Asprova.

Recently, we released Asprova2003 as a complete renewal of Asprova Ver9. When we started designing Asprova2003, the list of unsolved needs that we had gathered over the past nine years from existing users totaled around 650 items. After organizing these needs, we chose a list of 323 “challenge problems”, and designed a new base architecture that would be capable of solving nearly all of them. In the initial release of Asprova2003, solutions to some of the “challenge problems” are already implemented. The others we plan to implement as new features in upcoming releases. You can look forward to new features being released one after another to better meet your needs.

The new-architecture production scheduler Asprova2003 is a crystallization of the manufacturing know-how of the more than 900 Asprova users around the world. Within the company, we say we are working to be “the three world’s bests”. These three are “the world’s best scheduling logic”, “the world’s best graphical user interface”, and “the world’s best external interface”. These are the goals of the Asprova2003 development team.

However, Asprova2003 is not just the result of the pursuit of something technically impressive. Once, while visiting one of our users, I was told with great emotion that “deploying Asprova was what saved our company from bankruptcy”. Hearing that, I too was deeply moved. What I felt at that time was that “in an industry environment where it is as hard to make a profit as it is now, there can surely be no more rewarding work than if I could contribute to increasing our customers’ profits.”

It was that conviction that led me to set our primary goal in designing Asprova2003 to “contributing to increasing the profits of our customers”. It’s not easy to make a significant increase in one’s customers’ profit with just a piece of software. But feeling that if we’re going to do it at all, we’ll aim for what’s really important, regardless of the difficulty, it is precisely this goal that we have chosen to strive for.

If by using Asprova2003 you can achieve visual management in your factory, shorten lead times, reduce inventory, and increase your profits, then we will truly feel that our efforts were worthwhile. I hope that this feeling will be communicated to you through Asprova2003.

Kuniyoshi Takahashi Representative Director Asprova Corporation