The development of high intensity neutron sources coupled with improvements in instrumentation has made it possible to collect high quality diffraction patterns extremely rapidly, and studies of the kinetics of solid-state processes in real time are now feasible. As a consequence, it is now possible to monitor and optimise production processes in the neutron beam using kinetic neutron diffraction. To illustrate the power of the technique three studies of processing routes are described, one in magnet technology and two in biomaterials science.