Introduction

Introduction

What the SME Adapter is for

Big customers increasingly ask their suppliers for a digital twin of a product: a standard file that describes what the product is, how it performs, and what paperwork comes with it. The standard is the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), and it is defined by long, technical specifications that assume you already know them.

Most small and medium manufacturers have the product knowledge but not the specification knowledge. The SME Adapter closes that gap. You fill in ordinary forms about your company and your products, and the app produces a spec-conformant AAS file for you. You never have to read the standard.

What you can do with it

• Set up your company once: name, address, logo, contacts. This appears on every product you publish.
• Describe your products: identity, technical specifications, documents, certificates, carbon footprint, 3D models, and more. Each of these is a submodel of the AAS.
• Reuse your work: build a technical-data template once and apply it to a whole product family; decode your product type codes automatically into products.
• Export: download each product as an AASX file (or JSON or XML), or publish it straight into an AAS repository.

Who it is for

• Manufacturers who have been asked for AAS or digital-twin data and need a straightforward way to produce it.
• SMEs taking a first step into Industry 4.0 without a large IT project.
• Integrators who need well-formed AAS data to test with.

How to read this guide

The app works in a set order, because later screens reuse earlier data. The quickest way in is the four-step path on the Home page. If the words type, instance or submodel are new, read Key Concepts first; everything else builds on those.