LineSight vs iMetal: Tracking Yield or Planning for It?

What iMetal does well

Jonas Metals Software is the metals arm of Jonas Software, part of Constellation Software, and it was assembled from long-standing names. Jonas lists Jonas Metals USA and Metalogic as acquired in 2013 and PCI Systems in 2014. In 2025 Metal Center News reported that Stock Master, Prof.IT, MCMS and iMetal were being unified under the single Jonas Metals Software brand. The homepage claims more than 5,000 daily users and over 100 customers, lists phone lines in North America and the UK, and shows logos including Coast, All Steels, BM Steel, Curtis Steel, Kimco Steel, Leengate and Tomrods.

iMetal is the enterprise edition, aimed at "complex, multi-site metals operations, including trading, importing, processing and service centre environments." Its published strengths are the ones a group with several depots needs: real-time inventory across locations, grades and dimensions, while letting each site run itself; quotation and order management for complex pricing; and "consistent pricing and margin rules across the business." On processing, it supports "slitting, cut-to-length and downstream operations," with visibility of yield on that work.

Seeing yield versus planning for it

Yield visibility is valuable. A manager who can see the yield on last week's slitting by line, grade and site can find the problem jobs. But by the time yield is visible, the coil is already cut. The number that decides it was set earlier, when somebody chose which orders to put together on which coil and through which knife setup.

The iMetal product page does not mention production scheduling, nesting or optimization. That is typical for a metals ERP, which is built to keep an exact record of what the business has and what it promised. Choosing among millions of possible plans is a different kind of problem, and we wrote about why in Why your ERP can't plan a slitting line.

How LineSight works

LineSight connects to the ERP a shop already runs and reads open orders and inventory in real time. A planner chooses the orders to fill, and LineSight's optimization engine evaluates far more order-to-coil combinations than a person can, across the whole order book and inventory at once, to find the setups where widths nest together with the least trim loss. It works within the rules of the floor: grades, gauges, slit widths, PIW, edge conditioning, knife setups, multi-pass work, coil weights and lead times.

Every plan shows what is cut from which coil and why. A person approves it before anything goes to the ERP or the floor, and overrides carry into later plans. The Command Center adds order intake from email, PDFs, photos and texts, sales-order entry, work orders and freight, again with a person approving the decisions that matter.

Where each one fits

The two products sit at different points in the buying decision, and the honest answer depends on where you are.

• A stockholder in the UK or Europe replacing an older system: iMetal or Prof.IT is the relevant evaluation, and LineSight has nothing published for that market.
• A North American service center already running iMetal with a busy slitter: LineSight could sit on top, but it lists no iMetal integration. LineSight says each customer gets a dedicated integration built during onboarding, so ask what that would involve.
• A North American shop on PS Data, INVEX or Enmark: LineSight is already live with those, and the iMetal question does not arise.

Three jobs, and who does them

The month-end yield report for a slitting line

iMetal, which records the processing work and gives visibility of yield. LineSight does not replace that record.

A quote that has to follow group margin rules at a branch

iMetal, which applies consistent pricing and margin rules across sites. LineSight claims no quoting; a price stays with the people who own the customer.

Tomorrow's slitting plan for 30 open order lines

This is LineSight's job: one plan across every line and every eligible coil, approved by the planner and written back to the ERP. Without an integration to iMetal, that plan has nowhere to go, which is why the integration question comes first.

Pricing

LineSight's one named customer, Elite Steel, cut its scrap rate 2.9 points and added about $850K in annualized revenue. It is one shop's result, and your own orders are the better test. The scrap calculator shows what a point is worth on your own tonnage.

Can you use both?

In principle. iMetal would keep the record, the pricing rules and the yield reporting, and LineSight would build the slitting plans that the yield report later measures. In practice it depends on an integration LineSight does not list as live, and on LineSight serving your region. For a North American iMetal site, it is a reasonable conversation. For most UK and European stockholders, it is not one to have yet.

The bottom line

iMetal tells you what yield you got. LineSight is built to change it before the cut. They are separate purchases at separate moments: choose the ERP for its record-keeping, sites and region, then decide whether the slitting plan needs a layer of its own. Steel Manager III, the other Jonas-owned metals ERP, is covered in LineSight vs Steel Manager III.