LineSight vs PlanetTogether: Which One Belongs on a Coil Processing Floor?

What PlanetTogether does well

The pitch is plain and fair: a finite-capacity schedule planners can trust. The workflow on its site is five steps. Import master data, set optimization weights, generate a schedule, adjust it by hand, publish it back to the ERP. What-if scenarios and fast rescheduling when priorities move are central to how it is sold.

Connectivity is a real strength. The site names SAP, NetSuite, Kinaxis Maestro and AVEVA, and its integrations menu adds John Galt, Aptean and Shiftboard. For a mid-market plant on a mainstream ERP, that shortens the project.

Metal fabrication is one of its listed industries, where it promises to "optimize machine capacity, routing options, and job sequencing to reduce lead times and increase throughput." CAI Software announced its acquisition of PlanetTogether in June 2026 and said it would keep selling it standalone while investing in AI, analytics and cloud development.

Where it stops short for a service center

We found no mention of cutting stock, slitting, trim loss or coil allocation on PlanetTogether's site. Its AI language is about readiness ("Is Your Production Planning Ready For AI?") rather than a described feature. The named case studies we found include Knapheide, New Belgium Brewing and Standard Process; none is a coil processor.

The metal fabrication pitch is about machine capacity and routings, which suits a shop that bends, welds and assembles. On a slitter, the decision that sets the margin happens before any job reaches the schedule: which coil, which widths, how much edge trim. A scheduler treats those jobs as inputs.

How LineSight works differently

LineSight reads open orders and live inventory from the ERP and searches across the whole order book at once for the setups where widths nest with the least trim loss. It works to the rules a slitting floor runs on: gauge, grade, width, PIW, ID/OD, edge conditioning, knife setups, multi-pass, coil weights, mults, tolerances and must-ship dates. It also weighs money, not only yield, so a plan can be judged on what it earns.

Each plan shows what is cut from which coil and why. A person approves before anything goes to the ERP or the floor, and overrides carry into later plans. LineSight is publicly live with PS Data, INVEX and Enmark, and says each customer gets a dedicated integration built during onboarding, so a shop on another ERP should ask how that build would go.

LineSight does not offer plant-wide finite-capacity scheduling or shift boards. If you need routings sequenced across forty work centers, that is PlanetTogether's territory.

Where each fits in a real week

A service center with a fabrication shop behind the slitter

Slit coil feeds a press brake and weld cells with real routings. The slitter's plan is a cutting problem. The fab shop's week is a scheduling problem. This is the clearest case for using both.

A rush order for 30,000 lbs of 14 gauge hot rolled lands at 2 pm

In a scheduler, you move jobs to make room. On a slitting line, the question is also which coil the order can come from and what that does to the widths already planned. LineSight re-runs the plan against current orders and inventory, and the planner decides.

A plant with no coil to cut

Some of PlanetTogether's published case studies, New Belgium Brewing among them, come from operations that never open a coil. A scheduler suits them. LineSight would have nothing to offer.

Pricing

If you want a sense of what trim is costing before talking to either vendor, the scrap calculator takes tons per year, scrap rate and material cost.

Can you use both?

Yes, if you have both problems. LineSight decides what each coil becomes; the resulting work orders reach the ERP, and PlanetTogether can sequence them with the rest of the plant. No connector between the two is published, so the handoff would go through the ERP. Agree in advance which system owns the slitter's run order.

The bottom line

PlanetTogether is a broad, well-connected scheduler for plants where time on machines is the scarce thing. LineSight is narrow on purpose: coil, widths, trim, with a planner signing off. Elite Steel cut its scrap rate 2.9 points and added about $850K in annualized revenue with it, which is one shop's result and worth testing against your own orders.