The introduction of general purpose machining centers and the information system based on computer network has added a new control problem to the classical job shop control problems: a routing problem. A routing problem is to determine the machine on which a part will be processed. The modern manufacturing systems are given much system status information including the arrival time of the future parts via the computer network for automation. This paper presents and tests the performance of a routing procedure, LARP(Look-Ahead Routing Procedure) which uses look-ahead information on the future arrival of parts in the system. The manufacturing system considered in this paper has multi-stations which consists of general purpose machines and processes parts of different types. The application of LARP under many operating conditions shows that the reduction of part flow time and tardiness from the cases without using this information is up to 8% for flow time and 21% for tardiness. The procedure introduced here can be used for many highly automated systems such as an FMS and a semi-conductor fabrication system for routing where the arrivals of parts in the near future are known.