Operative production planning requires sequencing, scheduling and routing orders to production resources. Allocating orders to the factory floor on single lines, parallel lines, multiple lines, as well as splitting and merging lines requires detailed information and partly complex rules and strategies. Especially, if many different product and variants have to be produced, and sequencing of orders is restricted by a large number of rules, software support is mandatory. A simulation based sequencer tool can assist in reducing the manual effort for producing feasible schedules improving the schedule quality. Modern systems are using state of the art optimization such as genetic algorithms and enable the production planner to quickly generate optimized schedules.