In a flexible manufacturing environment, the determination of operational sequences is very important for the balanced utilization of resources and the optimal throughput of the system. In this paper, a real time scheduling approach for assignment of operations to machines in terms of minimization of flow distances, operational time and balance of workload is proposed through a fourphase heuristic. In phase 1, primary assignment of operations to machines based on the minimization of flow distances is done. Phase 2 involves final assignment of operations by assigning highest time consuming operations to quick processing machines. Phase 3 involves balance of workload by shifting operations among the machines. Phase 4 involves minimization of inter machine flow distances among machines. In order to show the capability of the proposed real-time scheduling heuristic, a reasonable sample of nineteen parts and twelve machines in a FMS environment is considered and solved. Numerical results show that the real time scheduling heuristic is extremely adaptive and highly time efficient even for solving a system with large number of parts and machines. The method is highly time efficient even for solving an FMS system with large number of parts and machines within a reasonable time.