Move material with less waiting, travel, and handling.
Material flow describes how raw material, components, work-in-process, containers, pallets, and finished goods move through the plant. Good flow reduces travel, double handling, congestion, hidden queues, and starvation between operations.
Design the plant around movement, capacity, and reliable execution.
Equipment placement, material travel, work queues, schedule changes, maintenance access, and production feedback all influence how smoothly a factory operates.
Reduce the hidden friction between production activities.
Unnecessary travel, unclear priorities, poorly placed storage, reactive maintenance, and unbalanced work can all consume capacity without appearing as direct machine cycle time.
CRIT-ARoute Length
Every extra move consumes labor, time, aisle capacity, and handling effort, so routes should follow the production sequence as directly as possible.
CRIT-BTransfer Method
Conveyors, AGVs, carts, forklifts, lifts, and manual handling each fit different load sizes, route stability, and flexibility needs.
CRIT-CWork-in-Process
Buffers can protect operations from short interruptions, but excess WIP increases lead time and can conceal recurring constraints.
CRIT-DPoint-of-Use Supply
Locating common components, tooling, and consumables near the operation can reduce walking and improve shortage visibility.
Visualize the operating pattern before changing the system.
These diagrams focus on plant-level behavior such as travel distance, queues, capacity loading, schedule sequencing, and maintenance risk.
Queue behavior.
Visible accumulation between processes can reveal mismatched capacity, release rules, or unreliable upstream operations.
Material route.
Mapping the real path of parts through the plant makes unnecessary travel and repeated handling easier to identify.
Relevant plant and production resources.
External references are selected from the approved TempoJS manufacturing link inventory and matched directly to the operating topic.
Material flow should make the shortest reliable trip from one production step to the next. Route length, handling method, staging, storage, buffers, and traffic all influence how much time material spends moving or waiting.