Answer
What production planning software suits a small manufacturer?
A small manufacturer needs software that starts from the data it already has — a spreadsheet, an ERP export, a stopwatch — and shows capacity, delivery dates and the bottleneck without a long rollout. It should sit beside the accounting or ERP package rather than replace it, and say plainly when a figure is missing instead of filling the gap.
Optonum is built for plants of roughly 20 to 150 people that plan in spreadsheets, and for smaller workshops that do not want a heavy ERP.
Reviewed 5 October 2026
How Optonum does it
- It runs in the browser and gives a first capacity figure on the day you sign up.
- Seven production types — job shop, discrete batch, repetitive, batch process, continuous, project and craft — each with its own setup questions and its own headline figures.
- Every headline figure is marked Model, Sim or Live, and missing data leaves a blank tile that says what is missing.
- The time-study, OEE and takt calculators work without plant data, so you can start with a stopwatch.
- Turkish and English throughout, including PDF and Excel exports.
What it does not do
- It is not an ERP: no general ledger, payroll or e-invoicing. A business that only needs accounting or e-invoicing is the wrong fit.
- It is not an MES or SCADA: there is no machine execution and no live machine data out of the box.
- It is not built for semiconductors, power generation, aerospace and defence, or livestock and field farming.
- It is an early-stage product with no customer results yet.