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About Creating and Analyzing Material Flow

Specify parameters for stations, the product, and the initial routing definition.

A collection of Factory tools enable you to specify the geometric content and parameters for stations, the initial product definition, and initial routing definition.

Stations

A Station is an area where a manufacturing process is applied to material or a component to generate a product. Station properties provide a means of assigning cost to the station setup and operation. Properties participate in the analysis results. A station is defined using drawing geometry and can be simple or complex, depending on your preference. The following demonstrate this point:

Products

A Product can be a single component or assembly that is produced as the output of the manufacturing process. Products can be nested within other products. For example, a sub-assembly (Sa1) can be part of a larger final assembly (Lg1) and a standalone product.

Routings

Routings represent the transportation between manufacturing stations. The routes between stations display as straight lines with arrowheads spanning the distance between station connectors. The arrowheads denote the direction of flow the product takes between stations and not the physical path. The routing lines provide estimated distances for analysis purposes.

Material Flow Browser

In the Material Flow Browser, routings appear as Jobs composed of one to many operations. Each Operation is tied to a station. For example, a welding operation would be identified as Operation: Welding. Depending on how you defined the stations, this could be a small operation or a complex one.

As with any design there can be times when you need to share data, either by importing or exporting it. Factory data, parameters in the form of spreadsheet files, can be imported or exported so that it can be modified or shared with others. Note that this applies to parameters alone, geometry is not imported or exported.

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