What is Material Flow?

The movement of physical items along the value stream. In mass production, products travel to centralized processes in large batches, pushed by instructions from a master…

Meaning and application in management

The movement of physical items along the value stream.

In mass production, products travel to centralized processes in large batches, pushed by instructions from a master schedule. In lean production, the process steps for different product families are carried out, whenever possible, in a tightly defined sequence of processes, so that small quantities of product can flow directly from step to step, pulled by the next downstream process and by the end customer.

See: Information Flow, Just-in-Time (JIT), Lean Production, Mass Production.

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