Mapping traffic flow through your plant

A traffic flow map shows how things move through your plant: raw ingredients in, people between areas, finished product out, waste away. It's the drawing an inspector uses to see whether your layout lets contamination travel, and it's a standard part of a preventive control plan.

Crown draws it over your existing facility layout, so you're not redrawing your plant — you're tracing routes across the floor plan you already have. Find it at Facility in the main menu, on the Traffic Flow tab.

What a flow is made of

• Paths are the movement lanes: one per kind of traffic. Each has its own colour, and you can show and hide them individually while you work.
• Arrows are the actual route a path takes across the floor plan, drawn segment by segment. Where a route passes through a doorway, Crown works out which rooms that doorway connects.
• Risk points are the places where flows meet in a way that could carry contamination. Each carries a severity of Low, Medium, or High, and a description of the control you rely on there.

Drawing your first flow

1. Create the flow

   On Facility → Traffic Flow, select New flow. Give it a name and a description.

2. Choose your starting paths

   Start from Crown's suggested lanes — Raw ingredients, Employees, Finished product, Waste, Packaging materials, and Returns and non-conforming product — and uncheck any that don't apply to your plant. Or Start blank and add your own from the editor sidebar.

3. Draw each route

   Pick a path, then trace its route across the floor plan. Draw the way material and people actually move, not the way you'd like them to — the map is only useful to you if it shows the real traffic.

4. Mark your risk points

   Wherever two flows cross, or a route passes something it shouldn't, place a risk point. Set its severity and describe how you control it.

5. Activate it

   When the map reflects your plant, activate the flow. It becomes the canonical diagram and flows into your preventive control plan.

Draft, active, superseded

A flow has a lifecycle, and it exists so your published map can't quietly change underneath the document that cites it.

Activating a flow supersedes whichever flow was active before, so there is only ever one canonical map — and the old one stays on file rather than disappearing.

To retire a flow entirely, archive it. It and its paths, arrows, and risk points are hidden from the list, and its audit history is preserved. Archived flows are still viewable under the Archived tab.

Crown QMSFlow versions and their lifecycle

Getting it into your preventive control plan

Section 6 of your PCP is the plant schematic, and an active traffic flow becomes part of it automatically. The document renders the routed diagram with its legend, the version number and effective date, and a numbered table of your risk points with their severities.

Because the published version and its effective date print alongside the diagram, an inspector reading a PCP from three months ago can see which map was in force at the time — and your superseded versions are the record backing that up.

What's next

For how Section 6 fits into the rest of the plan, see Your preventive control plan document.