Mexicana has acquired Carmen’s Tail Assignment product to further improve aircraft utilization and to link commercial planning with the planning of aircraft and crew.

Antonio Valle, EVP Information Technology at Mexicana, said that Mexicana needed to be able to respond quickly to market changes, to upgrade or downgrade flights as the booking information changes.

“To do this in a controlled way, we needed a tool that can integrate commercial information with information from the crew and maintenance systems.”

Captain Felix Sanchez, EVP Operations and Technical at Mexicana added, “Carmen’s optimization technology provides us the instrument to efficiently trade off potential revenue gains against operational costs.”

Magnus Wennerholm, SVP Airline Solutions at Carmen, said Mexicana are already using Carmen’s crew planning products and with Tail Assignment they will now be able to perform integrated crew and fleet planning.

“Mexicana want to get more flying out of their modern fleet. Their mix of hub-and-spoke and pointto- point traffic is challenging for designing a maintenance feasible schedule with high aircraft utilization.

Mexicana will use Tail Assignment extensively for scenario analyses to improve productivity.”

Carmen Tail Assignment will be in full production in early 2005 and has already been used to provide input to Mexicana’s summer schedule. Carmen will continue to deliver decision support for the aircraft utilization planning throughout the implementation project.