Posted January 15, 2002 New Products Motorola Adds Production Optimization Tool to Software Suite Motorola (Schaumburg, Ill.; www.motorola.com) offered manufacturers an additional tool to improve operating efficiency with the recent introduction of a new Manufacturing Balance at the APEX trade show in San Diego. This production optimization tool, introduced by Motorola's Global Software Group, determines the optimum build plan for an entire factory. Similar products are grouped together and assigned to the most capable line in a manufacturing facility. These lines are then balanced to evenly distribute the workload across all machines. Manufacturing Balance has been used effectively in Motorola's manufacturing factories for the past 10 years. During that time, the product has been researched, tested and enhanced. Factories using Manufacturing Balance for production optimization have documented savings of up to 34%. Production cost savings for the entire corporation totaled in the tens of millions of dollars during the tool's lifetime. Manufacturing Balance is the third tool in Motorola's manufacturing software suite. Last June Motorola introduced Manufacturing Pulse, a process monitoring tool that identifies and eliminates bottlenecks, reduces scrap and tracks productivity. October 2001 brought Manufacturing Intellitrak, an MES application suite using predictive genealogy, traceability data collection, build recipe and component verification, and defect/repair tracking. The Manufacturing Report © Copyright 2002 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. E-mail Editorial Dept: tmr-editorial@lionhrtpub.com Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 2555 Cumberland Parkway, Suite 299, Atlanta, GA 30339 USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com