Preactor pricing and Siemens Opcenter APS cost, with the three year math no price list shows

Nothing with a dollar sign. The Opcenter APS product page on siemens.com ends in a contact form, and the old Xcelerator store listing for the product now redirects to the same contact sales page. Capterra's listing for SIMATIC IT Preactor APS says contact vendor for pricing, and SoftwareConnect says pricing by request.

What Siemens does publish is the lineup you will be quoted against.

• Opcenter Scheduling Standard, which Siemens calls an entry level system with an interactive planning board. SoftwareConnect lists a 30 day trial
• Opcenter Scheduling Professional and Ultimate. SoftwareConnect says Ultimate adds API access and a customizable database schema
• Opcenter Planning, for forecast and long term order planning
• Opcenter Scheduling SMT, for electronics assembly lines

Most US plants buy through a partner rather than from Siemens directly. Lean Scheduling International describes itself as Siemens' largest North American partner and says it has implemented the product at nearly 350 manufacturers in North America. The partner writes the quote, does the implementation and usually sells the maintenance too, so the price you see is a partner proposal, not a Siemens list price.

Because nothing is published, every number online is a third party estimate. These are the ones with a source we could check. Treat all of them as estimates, not a Siemens price list.

You will also find search snippets quoting monthly plans or a per user price for Preactor. We could not trace any of them to Siemens, a partner or a working page, so we leave them out. User Solutions sells a competing product and does not cite sources for its figures, so read its upper ranges as the case it wants you to picture.

Why the numbers disagree so much: they price different things. A single site Standard license for one planner and a multi site Ultimate rollout with optimization rules, an SAP interface and a custom database are both called Opcenter APS.

Six things decide the number on a partner proposal. Have an answer to each before the call.

• Edition. Standard, Professional or Ultimate, and whether you need Opcenter Planning as well. Ultimate is where the optimization rules, the API and the custom database live
• Constraints. Scheduling machines only is a smaller model than machines plus operators plus tooling plus materials. Every extra constraint is more modelling work
• ERP interface. Partners connect Opcenter APS to SAP R/3, SAP S/4HANA, Microsoft Dynamics, Infor and proALPHA. An automatic two way interface costs more than a spreadsheet import, and someone has to maintain it
• Sites and planners. More plants and more people editing the schedule mean more licenses and more training
• Legacy licenses. If you own an old Preactor 200 FCS, 300 FCS, 400 APS or 500 APS license, Lean Scheduling says those had to move to the Opcenter structure by October 2022 to keep maintenance, so a lapsed install may need a new purchase rather than a renewal
• Maintenance terms. 18 to 22 percent a year is the usual range quoted. Ask whether year one is included and what the renewal cap is, and keep the signed terms somewhere you will find them at renewal; contract management software that tracks renewal dates is cheaper than an auto renewed maintenance invoice

For most plants the license is not the biggest number in year one. The implementation is.

Here is the arithmetic for one plant using the published estimates. Maintenance is counted from year two, which is how many partners bill it, so check your quote. It is a sketch, not a quote.

For a plant where several constraints really limit output, where a planning team runs the model every day and where changeover optimization saves real hours, that money can pay back. Opcenter is one of the most capable schedulers on the market.

For a 25 person plant whose complaint is "we never know which order will be late", it is a lot to spend on one problem. A finite capacity scheduler on our Plant plan costs 2,574 USD a year paid yearly, so 7,722 USD over the same three years, with no implementation fee and unlimited users. Line, for up to 10 work centers, is 894 USD a year, or 2,682 USD over three years.

These are different purchases. Opcenter models a complex plant in depth and a planning team runs it. We give a smaller plant a trustworthy schedule on its own. The honest comparison, including where Opcenter is the better buy, is on our Siemens Opcenter APS alternative page.

Write these down before the partner call. They are the questions that change the number.

• Which edition do you propose, Standard, Professional or Ultimate, and what would I lose one edition lower
• How many planner licenses are in the quote, and what does an extra one cost
• Is implementation fixed price or time and materials, and how many days does it include
• Which constraints will you model, and who updates the model when we add a machine or change shifts
• Is the ERP interface in the quote, and who maintains it after go live
• What is the yearly maintenance percentage, is year one included, and is there a renewal cap
• Can we run the trial of Opcenter Scheduling Standard on our own orders before signing

Siemens does not publish Preactor pricing, now sold as Opcenter APS. ITQlick estimates a start of 20,000 USD per organization, plus 20,000 to 100,000 USD or more for implementation and 18 to 22 percent a year in maintenance. A rival vendor estimates 15,000 to 40,000 USD for an entry license and 75,000 to 150,000 USD for a standard one.

After year one, the recurring cost is mainly maintenance, usually quoted at 18 to 22 percent of the license. On a 20,000 USD license that is 3,600 to 4,400 USD a year; on a 150,000 USD license it is 27,000 to 33,000 USD. Year one is far higher because the license and the implementation land together.

Siemens offered a free Preactor AS Express edition, described on its blog in 2019, and SoftwareConnect lists a 30 day trial of Opcenter Scheduling Standard today. A trial lets a planner test the planning board, but a production rollout is still a paid license plus implementation through a partner.

Siemens does not publish its license model. ERP Research describes it as a quote based subscription priced per user or per module, while ITQlick lists a per organization starting price. In practice the partner quote reflects the edition, the number of planners who edit the schedule and the number of sites.

It can be when several constraints really limit the plant and a planner has time to run the model. For a 10 to 60 person plant that mainly needs late orders flagged and a sequence per machine, three year costs from about 47,000 USD are hard to justify, and a per plant scheduler from 149 USD a month is the cheaper fix. Our best production scheduling software roundup compares the options.

Both are enterprise APS systems sold through a quote. Capterra lists PlanetTogether from 1,000 USD per user per month, which makes it a subscription, while Opcenter APS is usually quoted as a license plus yearly maintenance. Both need implementation. Our PlanetTogether alternative page has the seat arithmetic.