• Making the routing decision at release may support the balancing function based on a detailed balancing of workloads across machines, by fitting jobs from the pool into workload norms. This requires defining independent capacity groups one per each of the machines of the work centre1. Balanced loads are expected to improve the accurateness of flow times, which, in turn, enable establishing more accurate lead times and therefore release times. The routing decision at release is based on a smallest load rule.