Cellular manufacturing is a production process that produces
families of parts within a single line or cell of machines.
These part families and manufacturing cells are formed
using a technique called Group Technology. Part and machine grouping may
become apparent by rearranging the rows and columns of a part-machine matrix.
This paper describes and tests a heuristic procedure that reorders the rows and columns of a part-machine matrix with the objective of minimizing the total distance of the matrix elements from the matrix diagonal. The heuristic was tested on several existing problems from the literature. Lower bounds are also calculated.