When we move equipment, in way of social distancing, we need to understand the overall impact it will have on the material flow across our factory floor. The Factory Design Utilities in AutoCAD provide support for material flow and machine utilization analysis. In this module, we will focus on those tools.

Material Flow and Machine Utilization analysis have been part of the AutoCAD Factory Utilities since their initial release. These utilities allow you to establish workstations, products, and routings from your 2D AutoCAD data. Once your drawing is set up, you can determine the total distance of the path required for your material to cycle through all necessary processes across your factory floor. Then, you can move and reorient workstations and determine the difference in material flow and cycle time.

This module takes approximately 30 minutes to complete. By the end of the module, you should be able to:

Understand Material Flow and Machine Utilization analysis
Determine the path required for your material to cycle across your factory floor
Move workstations and determine the difference in material flow and cycle time

Module pre-requisites

This module requires user-level knowledge of Autodesk Inventor and AutoCAD and is focused on best practices and its industry applications. If you don't have experiences with this product, we recommend you to take foundational training using one of the resources below:

Built-in tutorials, available via in-product Help
eLearning Partners
Authorized Training Centers

About the author

This module was created by Rusty Belcher.

Before you start

Please make sure you have Autodesk Inventor and AutoCAD loaded.
If you have technical difficulties, please reach out to product support.

Accessing Factory files with Vault (2:54)