Our story
Why Yuma Shimizu built Yamastro
Yuma Shimizu spent approximately a decade in manufacturing IT, working directly with production engineers at automotive suppliers and industrial equipment manufacturers across Japan. His work involved digitizing process data — connecting PLCs to historians, helping quality teams move from paper-based records to structured databases, and advising plant managers on what metrics they should actually be tracking.
The pattern he kept seeing: mid-size Japanese factories with capable equipment — Mitsubishi and FANUC PLCs, decent SCADA systems, modern ERP installations — but no way to connect the layers. PLC data lived in the SCADA historian. Batch records lived in paper binders or disconnected databases. OEE was calculated in Excel on Monday morning from Saturday's shift logs. Traceability required three people and four systems during an audit.
The full MES solutions designed to solve this problem required multi-year implementations and integration teams that mid-size manufacturers cannot staff or afford. US-based process intelligence tools were designed for large-scale plants and not adapted for Japanese PLC conventions or kaizen（改善）workflows. Yamastro was founded to occupy the gap: a lightweight process intelligence layer that connects in weeks, not months, and is designed from the outset for Japanese factory environments.
Since 2022, Yamastro has grown to serve manufacturers across discrete, batch, and food sectors, with deployments in Aichi, Saitama, Kanagawa, and Gunma prefectures. The company operates independently from Tokyo.
How we think about building software for factories
Incremental data quality improvement, not rip-and-replace. Start with one line, one metric, one protocol. Add layers as value is proven. This mirrors how Japanese factories actually improve — iteratively, with evidence at each step.
No marketing demos on synthetic data. Every pilot runs on your actual line data — your PLCs, your shift schedule, your SKU definitions. Our engineers spend time on the factory floor before the first dashboard goes live.
Designed for mid-size Japanese manufacturers, not retrofitted from US SaaS. Our protocols, vocabulary, and kaizen（改善）workflows reflect Japanese manufacturing conventions. The product description is in English for global reach, but the design decisions are Japanese.
Run a pilot on one line. See live OEE in 30 days.
Our engineers handle the connection. You review the data.
Request a Pilot