System and method for real-time job cell-assignment using soft-computing is provided. The system includes a work-in-progress module, a load estimation module and a fuzzy inference module. Clients send jobs to the system and the system evaluates a plurality of document processing cells' capacity to process the jobs taking into consideration the cells' current workload and the cells' capacity to process the job. Specifically, the work-in-progress module determines a work-in-progress ("WIP") value for each cell that represents a current workload, and the load estimation module estimates a load value that represents how busy the cell is for jobs of a certain type. The fuzzy inference module applies the WIP and the estimated load values to a set of membership functions to associate the values with fuzzy values. The module determines merit values for the cells using the fuzzy values, and selects the cell having the largest merit value to route the job to.