This paper presents a cell formation approach for a cellular manufacturing system to minimize the inter-cell moves considering operation sequences. Two new factors are introduced: (1)flow-similarity(FS) for integrating direct/indirect inter-machine flow and similarity (2)machine cell-part moves (CPM) for exactly computing inter-cell moves. FS is used for combining machines and CPM is used for assigning the parts to the preliminary machine cells. In addition, we develop an aggregated heuristic algorithm to form manufacturing machine cells and assign the parts to those cells based on these concepts. We use performance criterion called total inter-cell moves(TICM), which is the total material flow between internal cells and external cells. Results of computational tests on a number of randomly generated test problems show that the suggested heuristic is superior to existing methods.