LineSight vs DELMIA Quintiq: An Enterprise Planning Platform or a Service-Center Optimizer?

What DELMIA Quintiq does well

DELMIA Quintiq's metals pitch runs from work order planning and rolling-mill sequencing up to S&OP and what Dassault calls financial-first planning. At its center is a supply chain virtual twin, a live, optimized model of orders, capacity, inventory and logistics that updates in real time, with execution handed to DELMIA Apriso and carbon cost available as a scheduling trade-off. Dassault cites average results of 20 percent less inventory, a 75 percent reduction in late orders and manual planning effort, and 20 percent overall cost savings. Those are vendor averages with no baseline given.

The Elval case study shows what that looks like at a producer. Elval, a Greek aluminum roller with 12 plants and 320,000 tons a year, struggled with combining orders on coils in its cold area. DELMIA Quintiq's order-combination concept, one coil serving many order lines or several coils serving one, resolved what Elval's project manager called a nightmare. Elval reports backlog down by more than half and lead times on some products cut from up to 12 weeks to about four. Elval also chose it partly for its ability to integrate with SAP.

The deeper strength is configurability. A platform built to be modeled can represent constraints that no packaged product anticipated, across many plants and every planning horizon at once.

Where it stops short for a service center

Dassault's metals page does not mention service centers, slitting or coil cutting; the production example it gives is rolling-mill sequencing. The only service-center reference we found is a 2008 trade article listing Quintiq scheduling tools for hot mill, cold mill, tube mill, bar mill and service-center applications. The published case studies are producers.

Then there is project size. Elval rolled DELMIA Quintiq out in stages: a Routing Generator in May 2008, a Company Planner in April 2009, a Melt Cast Scheduler in June 2010 and the Hot Mill, Cold Mill and Foil Scheduler in June 2012. Elval's project manager said that of the three vendors it evaluated, DELMIA Quintiq's offer was the most expensive but gave better value. That is a sound decision for a 320,000-ton producer replanning a whole mill. A service center that wants better patterns on three slitters is making a different purchase.

We found no packaged slitting model on the metals page. Our inference is that knife, arbor, PIW and edge-trim rules would be modeled during implementation, which is how a platform earns its flexibility.

How LineSight works differently

LineSight arrives with the service center's rules already in it: grades, gauges, slit widths, ID/OD, PIW, edge conditioning, knife setups, multi-pass, coil weights, min and max mults, skidding, width tolerances, toll processing and must-ship orders. Onboarding sets those up around your lines, and most customers are fully live in under a month.

It connects to the ERP you already run and reads open orders and coil inventory in real time. LineSight's optimization engine builds the plan, every plan shows what is cut from which coil and why, and a person approves it before anything reaches the ERP or the floor. Planner overrides are kept, and later plans respect them. The Command Center extends the same approach from purchase order to release: order entry, work orders, freight and material buys, with the team approving the calls that matter.

The trade is scope. LineSight does no S&OP, no mill sequencing and no shop-floor execution system. It plans the decisions a service center makes every morning, and leaves the record keeping to the ERP.

Three planning problems, matched to the tool

Sequencing a hot mill against a cold mill and a foil line

DELMIA Quintiq. This is the published Elval case, and LineSight does not plan rolling or casting.

Choosing which coil to slit for tomorrow's orders

LineSight. It evaluates the order set against every compatible coil and shows the scrap, lead time, freight and profit on each pattern. The guide to reducing slitting scrap explains why coil choice moves yield as much as it does.

Promising a delivery date

At Elval, DELMIA Quintiq gives a forecast completion date that is used to inform customers, and sales representatives see expected delivery dates through SAP. That is a real strength. LineSight respects lead times and must-ship orders inside each plan but does not commit dates; the promise stays with the people who own the customer.

Pricing and project size

Can you use both?

In one group, possibly. A producer could plan its mills on DELMIA Quintiq while separately run service centers plan slitting with LineSight on their own ERPs. We know of no published example, and inside one operation the two would compete for the same cutting decisions.

The bottom line

DELMIA Quintiq is an enterprise optimization platform with more than 20 years in metals, and producers with complex multi-plant planning have good reason to choose it. LineSight is narrower and, on published timelines, quicker to set up: a planning product for service centers that keeps the ERP, keeps the planner in charge, and starts on live orders. The one customer result LineSight publishes, from Elite Steel, is a scrap rate 2.9 points lower and about $850K in added annualized revenue. One service center is not a forecast for yours, so test on your own orders. Producers comparing enterprise suites may want PSImetals vs DELMIA Quintiq or Siemens Opcenter APS vs DELMIA Quintiq.