This category covers software for demand forecasting, inventory and production planning, warehouse management and the maintenance of installations (enterprise asset management, EAM). Manufacturers, logistics companies and utilities use it to decide what is produced, stored and maintained, and when. Blue Yonder and IBM Maximo are well-known non-European reference points.
What matters here is operational continuity. A planning system that goes down can stop a warehouse or production line, and maintenance software helps decide whether installations keep running safely. NIS2 names the manufacturing of critical products as one of its sectors. Bills of materials, recipes, forecasts and maintenance history also contain trade secrets, and these systems connect to machines and sensors, so a fault or external administrative access can reach into operations. Long-running maintenance data built up in a closed model is hard to take along when you switch.
When choosing a European option, look at whether it can keep working locally or at the network edge if the cloud connection drops, at open links to machines and ERP, at full export of asset and maintenance history, and at clear commitments on support duration. Also ask who may access your systems remotely and how that is logged.