We recently hosted a live webinar to share some big news with our customers and partners: PlanetTogether has been acquired by CAI. If you missed it, here's the full recap — who CAI is, what PlanetTogether brings to the table, why we came together, and what it all means for the factories, planners, and partners who rely on us.

The short version? This isn't a story about one product being absorbed into another. It's about bringing planning, scheduling, execution, and continuous improvement under one roof — so the plan you build actually reaches the floor, and what happens on the floor makes your next plan smarter.

Who Is CAI?

If you're coming from the PlanetTogether world, you may not have heard the name CAI directly — but you've almost certainly heard of its brands. CAI is a software manufacturer focused specifically on the manufacturing space, bringing a family of purpose-built products together under one umbrella.

CAI operates across three divisions — process manufacturing, discrete manufacturing, and graphic communications — and it works primarily in the enterprise space around ERP-adjacent solutions. Its brands, including PlanetTogether, Parsable, and ShopVue, were mission-built for manufacturers, often by people who came directly from the plant floor or the plant manager's office and saw firsthand the gaps that off-the-shelf software left behind.

Scheduling is complicated. Scheduling is critical. And for a lot of our customers, scheduling still lives on a whiteboard. They've been telling us for years that they want to digitize it — and this acquisition answers many of those questions. — Elizabeth, Chief Commercial Officer, CAI

Where an ERP is the backbone of the business, it doesn't always go deep enough in specialized areas. That's where CAI focuses: MES, inventory and EDI, connected worker and digitized factory-floor processes — and now advanced planning and scheduling. The goal is simple to say and hard to do: get the right people to the floor with the right tasks in the right order, so what you make ships efficiently, at the highest quality, and on time.

What PlanetTogether Brings

For more than 20 years, PlanetTogether has built advanced planning and scheduling (APS) software — think of it as a digital twin of your factory floor that captures the primary and secondary constraints that go into a real production schedule. The payoff: a schedule produced in minutes rather than the hours or days it takes when things don't go according to plan.

The technology was born out of Cornell research and refined starting in 2004, through decades of building schedules for some of the most complex manufacturing environments in the world. Along the way, PlanetTogether earned a reputation for four things in particular:

Why CAI Acquired PlanetTogether

Three reasons stood out on the webinar. First, PlanetTogether fills critical scheduling gaps that CAI's enterprise customers run into every day — where you build a schedule depends heavily on your country, what your factory makes, and the traceability, timing, and expiration constraints around it. Second, many PlanetTogether customers stand to benefit from the rest of the CAI ecosystem, like connected-worker tooling. Third, the combination creates a category-defining platform — an unfair advantage for manufacturers.

There's also a people story. Ted Recio, PlanetTogether's COO, is joining CAI as VP of Partners and Ecosystem Integration — a strong signal that the partner network isn't just being maintained, it's being invested in and grown.

How 1 + 1 Can Equal 3

In 2024, CAI acquired Parsable, a leading connected-worker solution used across APAC, LatAM, North America, and EMEA to digitize paper-based factory processes. Put PlanetTogether and Parsable together and you get something neither delivers alone: a closed loop that runs from planning all the way through to learning.

When those pieces work as one system, plans reach the floor — the person executing the schedule gets told exactly what to do and when. And reality informs the plan — what actually happens on the floor feeds back into smarter decisions. That's real, continuous improvement.

It's not just "go do a quality check on this line." It's "go do a quality check on this line at 9:20, and be done by 9:50." That's the unfair advantage we can start to put into your hands. — Elizabeth, Chief Commercial Officer, CAI

A Full Manufacturing Suite, Built for Everyone

Your ERP will always be the backbone of the business — whether that's a CAI ERP, SAP S/4HANA, or something else. Layer PlanetTogether's APS, Parsable's connected-worker solution, and technologies like MES on top of it, and you get a complete manufacturing suite designed for every role in the process.

The point isn't just more software — it's software that works together in a way that's easy to use and actually accelerates business value: greater efficiency, real digitization, and trustworthy data you can use to make smarter decisions over time.

A Quick Word on Parsable

If you're new to Parsable, it's a connected-worker tool focused on digitizing paper processes inside the factory — and it's been part of the CAI ecosystem for a couple of years now. It focuses on guided digital work: replacing paper SOPs with step-by-step digitized procedures (with AI in the loop), keeping you audit-ready with real-time compliance checks, and delivering all of it through a mobile-first app that's proven at enterprise scale.

For PlanetTogether users, that's the natural other half of the loop: the schedule you optimize is exactly what shows up as guided work on the floor.

What This Means for You

The webinar wrapped with a live Q&A. Here are the questions that mattered most — and the honest answers.