Freightliner LLC (Portland, OR), North America's largest heavy-duty truck manufacturer and a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler, has implemented Tecnomatix Technologies Ltd.'s (Portsmouth, NH) eMPower software throughout its manufacturing plants. This has enabled the company to significantly reduce the time it takes for daily production planning.

Freightliner is using the eMPower eM-Sequencer scheduling tool to assign production orders among its assembly lines and to sequence orders per line. The goal is to achieve a constant product mix over time and a balanced workload throughout the day.

eM-Sequencer is a turnkey program for sequencing and allocating orders to assembly and feeder lines. If different products have to be produced, and order sequencing is restricted by a large number of rules, eM-Sequencer can help production planners improve schedule efficiency by reducing the manual effort involved in creating the most efficient schedules. In addition, eM-Sequencer helps production planners generate optimized schedules to define and maintain scheduling rules. The software can be integrated into most existing manufacturing environments and can be connected to a wide variety of database management systems.

"By using eM-Sequencer, we now have a scheduling solution that gives us better and more reliable parameters for optimizing production planning and an overall better scheduling quality," says Curtis Rhodes, industrial engineering manager at Freightliner. "After implementing eM-Sequencer in our planning environment, we were able to reduce the time it took to schedule a production sequence from 3 days to 30 minutes."

For more information on eMPower, call 603-431-9411 or visit www.tecnomatix.com.