Planwisely
Planwisely is an AI-driven Advanced Planning & Scheduling platform for manufacturers. It rebuilds an optimal production schedule per line in seconds, models your factory as a digital twin, and forecasts demand four weeks ahead on your existing ERP.
What is Planwisely?
Planwisely is a software-as-a-service Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) system for manufacturing companies. It is published from Amsterdam by the company formerly trading as Data Refinery Amsterdam, which took the Planwisely name on 15 August 2024 alongside a new release of its scheduling software. The product is built on two pillars: production scheduling and demand forecasting, backed by data science services during implementation.
The scheduling engine is the core. Using AI, it produces an optimal schedule per production line for the coming days within seconds, so a planner can see which batch runs at what time under the plant's own constraints. Preferences and conditions can also be entered by hand, and the engine takes them into account. This matters most when the schedule breaks: rush orders, cancellations, a changed delivery date, machine failure, staff illness, or a stock shortage or surplus can all be replanned directly rather than rippling through the week.
Around that engine sit four modules. Factory recreates the plant as a virtual twin, with every production line, workstation, precondition and dependency, including intermediate stages such as drying or curing, so the system can evaluate whole scenarios rather than a single plan. Workplace pushes the schedule out to the shop floor per workstation, where operators report start-up and readiness and can chat with the planner. Order Promising answers the awkward question of whether a large late order can actually be delivered, calculating its impact on the schedule immediately. Master Data holds raw materials, products and bills of materials.
The demand forecasting side builds a model tuned to the customer's own market variables, predicting product sales for the next four weeks including weather and holiday effects, accepting the company's own sales forecast and raising alerts on deviations.
Planwisely deliberately sits on top of the existing ERP rather than replacing it, claiming real-time connections regardless of vendor, with Microsoft, SAP and Oracle named as examples. It is also listed on the Azure Marketplace, the publisher being a Microsoft ISV partner. The vendor advertises savings of 20 to 50 percent of planner time, 5 to 15 percent on raw materials and 5 to 10 percent on changeover times, and targets thirteen named industries from food and chemicals to electronics assembly.
What it does
- Generate an optimal production schedule per line in seconds
- Absorb rush orders, cancellations, breakdowns and staff absence without missing delivery dates
- Simulate the plant as a digital twin and compare planning scenarios
- Answer a customer delivery promise in seconds with the Order Promising module
- Forecast demand four weeks ahead, including weather and holiday effects
- Share the live schedule with operators workstation by workstation
- Optimise the schedule against the KPIs each plant actually manages
When to use Planwisely / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Planwisely is the right fit.
When to use Planwisely
- Production planners in make-to-order plants where the schedule is never final
- Operations and plant managers chasing changeover time, waste and on-time-in-full
- Demand planners and S&OP managers who need a four-week forecast per product
- Manufacturers of perishable or mixed-product ranges with multi-step processes
- Companies still planning production in Excel and ready to leave it behind
When not to use Planwisely
- Small workshops for which a EUR 1,400 monthly licence per plant is out of proportion
- Teams that want to sign up online and try the software themselves the same day
- Buyers who need a published DPA, a certification or a contractual SLA before purchase
- Organisations already deeply committed to the Infor ERP ecosystem, which the vendor itself points to Infor APS for
- Businesses with no ERP or no usable production data to feed the scheduler
How to use Planwisely
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Book the 30-minute introduction the site offers as a sneak preview, to gauge what AI could gain your plant
- Run the online impact scan or download the factsheet to frame the business case internally
- Move on to a fuller demonstration if the introduction shows enough potential
- Agree the implementation at a fixed price arranged in advance
- Let the vendor's data scientists analyse your production, inventory, lead time and demand data
- Model the plant: production lines, workstations, preconditions, dependencies and intermediate stages such as drying or curing
- Load the master data — raw materials, products and bills of materials
- Connect the live ERP feed; a custom connector to your ERP is charged as a surcharge
- Train planners and shop floor users, budgeting two to three months for the whole implementation
- Run it daily: optimise, adjust by hand where needed, and publish the schedule to each workstation
Pros & Cons
Pros
- The licence price is published — EUR 1,400 per plant per month — which is uncommon in the APS market
- Licensed per plant rather than per user, so nobody is priced out of using it on the shop floor
- Sits on the existing ERP instead of replacing it, with real-time connections claimed whatever the vendor
- Rescheduling in seconds, including on last-minute disruption
- The digital twin models intermediate stages such as drying and curing, which lighter tools tend to skip
- Short stated implementation of two to three months, end-user training included
- European publisher, data processed within the EEA, and a small named team that can be reached directly
Cons
- No terms and conditions and no legal notice exist anywhere on the site, checked across all 57 sitemap URLs
- The only legal document is a privacy statement from October 2023, still in the former Data Refinery Amsterdam name and pointing at a different website
- That statement covers website and contact data only; nothing addresses the production data entrusted to the product
- No data processing agreement, no certification, no trust centre, and no hosting country named beyond the EEA
- Nothing is said about whether customer data trains any model, nor about any way to exclude it
- Two pages, the about and FAQ pages, are unedited theme templates carrying placeholder text and fictitious contact details
- No free plan, no self-serve trial and no mobile app, and the published price covers the licence alone
Pricing & Plans
There is no free plan and no free trial. The only published price is the software licence, set at EUR 1,400 per plant per month and charged explicitly per plant rather than per user. Three further items are quoted individually and no amount is published for any of them: implementation, at a fixed price agreed in advance; hosting and security, tailored to the customer's needs and requirements; and a surcharge for a custom connection to the ERP. Implementation is stated to take two to three months, end-user training included. Prospective customers are invited to request a quotation for their own situation.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Planwisely handles your data.
GDPR overview
The GDPR is addressed, but only for website and contact data. The privacy statement names the General Data Protection Regulation as the framework it must satisfy, alongside general Dutch law, and lists the data subject rights one by one: information, access, rectification, objection, portability, restriction, erasure and complaint. Requests go to info@datarefinery.amsterdam and are answered within 30 days, extended to 60 for complex cases. Processing and storage take place within the European Economic Area, and the supervisory authority named is the Dutch data protection authority. As the publisher is established in the Netherlands, no Article 27 representative is required or designated. No data protection officer is named, no data processing agreement is offered, and no certification such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2 is claimed anywhere on the site.
Who owns the data?
Planwisely publishes no terms and conditions, so ownership of production data is not defined contractually anywhere on the site. The only legal document is a privacy statement, last modified on 15 October 2023 and still written in the name of the former brand Data Refinery Amsterdam, Stadionkade 131 1, 1076BS Amsterdam. It names that company as responsible for the personal data of website visitors, customers and business contacts, and states that this data is used by the company alone and never shared with others. It says nothing at all about the production, inventory and ERP data that customers entrust to the scheduling product itself.
Reuse rights
Because no terms of use are published, the site never states what customers may do with the data they load into Planwisely or with the schedules and forecasts it returns, nor whether those outputs can be reused freely. The privacy statement addresses personal data only, and lists its own purposes: sending the newsletter and advertising, contacting customers to deliver the service, updating services and handling payment, statutory tax and personnel obligations, recruitment, website analytics, and follow-up after a download or webinar registration. Those analytics rely on Google Analytics, HubSpot, Google Adwords, the LinkedIn Insight Tag and AdRoll remarketing. Any reuse rights over planning data will have to be secured in the contract, since the website grants none.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The site makes a single hosting commitment: data is processed and stored within the European Economic Area. Nothing narrower is offered. No country is named, no data centre or region is identified, and no hosting provider is disclosed. Hosting and security are themselves a line in the price list, described as tailored to the customer's needs and requirements, which suggests the arrangement is negotiated case by case rather than standardised. The software is distributed through the Azure Marketplace and the publisher is a Microsoft ISV partner, but the site never states that customer data is hosted on Azure, and it should not be assumed. No subprocessor list is published; the privacy statement instead asserts that personal data is never shared with others. No certification such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2 is claimed. The website itself is served through Cloudflare, which says nothing about where customer production data resides. Buyers with a data residency requirement should get the hosting location written into the contract.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Planwisely.
- The EUR 1,400 monthly licence is per plant: a multi-site group multiplies it, and implementation, hosting and the ERP connector are all quoted on top
- With no terms of service, no SLA and no data processing agreement published, the entire commercial and legal framework has to be negotiated privately
- The privacy statement predates the rebrand and still describes another brand and another website, which makes it a weak basis for a compliance review
- The same document promises never to share personal data while listing third-party cookies from HubSpot, Google Adwords, LinkedIn and AdRoll: raise the contradiction before signing
- Unedited template pages on the site carry fictitious contact details, including an unrelated support address and a US street address; none of them belong to the publisher
- Open APIs are claimed in a blog article but no API documentation is published, so integration effort cannot be scoped from the website alone
- Handing scheduling to an optimiser can quietly erode a planner's own feel for the plant; keep the manual overrides and scenario comparisons in active use
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Moderate, and not a self-service exercise. Implementation is stated at two to three months including end-user training, and is carried out by the vendor's own data scientists rather than by the customer. The work involves analysing production and demand data, modelling the plant as a digital twin with its lines, workstations, dependencies and intermediate stages, loading master data, and establishing a live ERP connection — the last of these billed as a surcharge when it has to be custom-built. There is no trial to install and nothing to configure alone, so the effort is mostly organisational: making data and planners available.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Planwisely
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Planwisely.
Frequently asked questions
What does Planwisely actually do?
Do we have to replace our ERP?
How much does it cost?
Is the price per user?
How long does implementation take?
Is there a free trial?
Which industries is it aimed at?
Where is our data stored?
What is the digital twin for?
Who is behind Planwisely?
Should you pick Planwisely?
Planwisely is a focused, credible Advanced Planning & Scheduling system for mid-sized manufacturers, and it does something most of its market avoids: it publishes a price. EUR 1,400 per plant per month, charged per plant rather than per user, is a genuinely useful number for anyone trying to build a business case. The product itself is substantial — an AI engine that rebuilds a line schedule in seconds, a digital twin that models intermediate stages such as drying and curing, an order promising module that answers delivery questions on the spot, and a demand forecast that reaches four weeks out. Sitting on top of the existing ERP rather than replacing it is the right architectural choice for the companies it targets, typically those leaving Excel behind.
The reservations are not about the software but about everything around it. The site publishes no terms and conditions and no legal notice at all; its only legal document is a privacy statement from October 2023 that still carries the previous brand and points at a different website, and that covers website visitors rather than the production data a customer would actually entrust to the product. There is no data processing agreement, no certification, and no hosting country named beyond the EEA. Two pages of the site are still unedited theme templates, which does little for the impression of polish.
None of that makes the tool a poor choice, but it does move the burden onto the buyer. The published price covers the licence only, and implementation, hosting and the ERP connector are all quoted separately, so a serious evaluation runs through the 30-minute introduction and a written quotation. Ask for the contractual terms in that same conversation — they are the part the website does not give you.
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