MCP Server
Beas Manufacturing ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server inside the Beas web server. It lets an AI assistant — Claude Desktop, an IDE assistant, or a partner application — read and, when you allow it, change the manufacturing data of the connected company through a standard protocol, instead of a bespoke integration written for each assistant.
The server speaks MCP over HTTP at /mcp. What an assistant sees there is not the raw database: it
is a curated set of tools for the questions people actually ask ("which work orders are
overdue", "what does this item's routing look like"), a small set of prompts that walk an
assistant through a multi-step analysis, and resources it can read to orient itself. Every call
runs as a real Beas user, under that user's permissions.
When to use MCP rather than the API
Both reach the same data, and both are listed in this manual's navigation. They are for different jobs.
| Use it for | |
|---|---|
| MCP | Letting an assistant answer questions and carry out tasks in your own words. The assistant chooses the tools; you do not write queries. |
| REST API | Building an integration you control — a scheduled job, a middleware, a partner add-on. You write the requests. |
An assistant connected over MCP is not restricted to the tool list: beas_odata_query reaches any
entity the API exposes, so anything the API can read, MCP can read too.
What it can do
| Area | Examples |
|---|---|
| Work orders | Search and open orders, list their positions, routing operations and material lines. |
| Production times | List bookings against operations, running and closed, and post a new time receipt. |
| Resources | List machines and work centres with capacity and cost data, and record a downtime. |
| Quality control | Search QC orders, samples, inspection plans, templates, groups, valuations and blockage reasons. |
| Master data | Business partners, warehouses, bin locations, personnel, tools, units of measure, material groups. |
| Planning and costing | MRP scenarios and results, reservations, routings and operations, calculation schemas, cost centres, precalculations. |
| Maintenance | Maintenance objects and orders, internal and external maintenances, status codes. |
| Calendars and shifts | Resource calendars, shift definitions, day templates, personnel shift models, period rules, absence types. |
| Analytics | Work-order KPIs and a status breakdown, answered as counts rather than rows to tally. |
The full list is in Tools — 73 tools in total, of which 4 change data.
What it does not do
There is no web page for browsing or trying the server: an assistant discovers what is available by asking the server itself, which is what the protocol is for. Nothing here replaces the web client — the tools cover reading widely and writing narrowly, and anything not exposed as a write tool is still done in the application.
An assistant with a write-enabled connection can create work orders, change work-order headers, post production times and record resource downtimes — real production data. Read Security and permissions before you enable write tools for anyone.
Getting started
- Check that the server is switched on and reachable — Connecting.
- Decide how the assistant authenticates. An API key is read-only; a user session unlocks writes and the generic OData tool.
- Point the assistant's MCP client at the endpoint and let it list the tools.
Related functionality
- Model Context Protocol specification — the protocol itself, and the clients that speak it.