Answer
What can I use instead of Excel for production planning?
Keep the spreadsheet as the way data comes in, and move the plan into a tool that holds one model of the plant: its machines, routings, shift calendar and order book. Capacity, delivery dates and the bottleneck are then calculated from the same data for everyone, instead of differing between each planner's copy.
A spreadsheet cannot play the plant forward in time; a planning tool with simulation can, so a change is tested before it is made on the floor.
Reviewed 5 October 2026
How Optonum does it
- Machines, bills of materials, routings, orders, quality readings and customers import from CSV or Excel (.xlsx, .xls). Turkish column headers work, and a blank cell is read as "not supplied", never as zero.
- A first capacity figure on the first day: the setup wizard asks up to four questions about the station that limits your output.
- Delivery dates come from the order book, the capacity of the line, the shift calendar and — where stock and purchase orders are recorded — material. When nothing on order covers a shortage, it says No Material instead of inventing a date.
- A change — a new shift, a shorter changeover, another machine — is tested in a flow simulation in the browser and compared with the baseline run.
- Your data can be exported as CSV or JSON at any time.
What it does not do
- It does not replace your ERP or accounting package: no general ledger, payroll or e-invoicing.
- It is not an APS constraint solver: scheduling is a Gantt chart with dispatch rules.
- It cannot give a trustworthy answer from no data. A missing figure shows as a blank, not a guess.