What is Takt Time?

Takt time is the maximum amount of time in which a product needs to be produced in order to satisfy customer demand. The term comes from the German word Takt, which means pulse. Set by customer demand, Takt creates the pulse or rhythm across all processes in a business to ensure continuous flow and utilization of capacities (e.g., man and machine). Why Do We Need Takt Time? Takt time is more than a metric of time its a whole different way of thinking for running your operations. First, Takt ensures that all the capacity in a business is planned and utilized and still meets overall customer demand. By and large, Takt will help to deliver the right product (RP) at the right time (RT) in the right quantity (RQ) to the customer. You can achieve RP, RT, and RQ without implementing Takt; however, this could lead to much waste of man and machine. Second, Takt creates a constant pulse across your processes, which will immediately highlight capacity issues, synchronization issues among processes, quality issues and many others. How to Calculate Takt Time: Takt Time = Production Time Available Customer Demand Where production time available = total production time breaks maintenance activities shift changeover clean down time and Customer demand = amount of units required by customer/ time period Calculation Example: Total Time: 8 Hours X 60 Minutes = 480 Minutes Breaks: 50 Minutes Time Available: 430 Minutes Customer Demand in 8 Hours: 100 Pcs Takt Time: 430 / 100 = 4.3 Minutes = 258 Seconds This example shows that the customer will need one pcs every 258 seconds. However, you might like to produce a single pcs in little less than 258 seconds in order to accommodate any variation in process steps, breakdowns, quality issues, etc. Its therefore essential that before you implement Takt, you ensure that your processes are dependable and can deliver good quality, and that your machine has a very high uptime.

How to Implement Takt Time Takt has an easy formula, but its one of the most difficult to implement in the Lean world.

You can start implementing Takt time by first measuring individual cycle times. Insert this data into the formula in order to calculate Takt time. To begin aligning your process to the Takt time, start dividing the work that goes into the process into value adding and non-value adding activity. Eliminate the nonvalue adding time and balance the workload of the operators.

Bring the individual cycle times closer to the Takt time. Keep the line balanced. In this case you will need fewer operators.

A Real Life Takt Time Consider the process of a water delivery system. The overall demand of water consumption is set by the homes that consume the water over 24 hours. However, the homes occupants do not consume the same amount of water across the 24 hours: There is a huge peak in consumption in the morning, afternoon and late evening, but for the rest of the day consumption is very low. However, the city water treatment plant cannot operate only when water consumption peaks, as the plant risks wasting much of its capacity. Therefore, the plant designs its capacity by looking at the consumers daily water consumption in liters per hour and also by considering seasonal fluctuations and the potential increase in consumption over the years to come. Based on this data, the plant calculates what the demand is every hour and adds a little buffer to address fluctuations, breakdowns, leakages, etc. The water treatment plant operates based on this demand rate so that each process step must deliver the same amount of water in that period. If some process is not able to deliver at the same rate, then either the plant needs to add more capacity or run that process for a longer time. The reservoir in between the plant and the homes (shown in the figure below) will smooth the impact of demand on the production process. The reservoir will also help with capacity issues related to the fact that as the water treatment plant is delivering water at a constant rate, consumption remains variable over the course of the day.

Now the trade-off is between the cost advantage to run the power plant at the same run rate across the day and the cost of the reservoir. There is no one answer in the real world. Depending on your cost structure of man, machine and material, you must define how smoothly you can run your processes across the day, week or month, versus the inventory you may need to be able to adjust to customer demand variation. On the other hand, inventory is evil in the Lean world, but you have to look at total cost versus individual costs. About Pankaj Aggarwal Pankaj Aggarwal is the Regional Director for telecommunications giant Indus Towers. He has nearly two decades of experience working in Operations, Operational excellence and Supply Chain Management roles. Prior to Indus Towers, Pankaj worked for Lufthansa, Delphi Automotive, General Electric, Suzuki Motors, KPMG Peat Marwick, and Tata Engineering. While working for these companies he gained experience in the automotive industry, research and development, manufacturing operations, consultancy, quality management, supplier development, and auditing. He has worked with more than 300 companies of various types in various capacities. Aggarwal is a mechanical engineer and has an MBA in Finance and Marketing. In addition, he is a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt, DFSS Master, Shainin Journeyman, Certified auditor for QS 9000/ ISO 9000 and Lean Leader. I invite you to join as a member of the PEX Network Group http://tinyurl.com/3hwakem, you will have access to Key Leaders Globally, Events, Webinars, Presentations, Articles, Case Studies, Blog Discussions, White Papers, and Tools and Templates. To access this free content please take 2 minutes for a 1 time FREE registration at http://tiny.cc/tpkd0 PEX Network, a division of IQPC, facilitates access to a wealth of relevant content for Process Excellence, Lean, and Six Sigma practitioners. Further enhanced with an online community of your peers, we will provide you with the tools and resources to help you perform more effective and efficiently, while enhancing the quality operations within your organization. As our industry becomes more and more dependent on the Web for information, PEXNetwork.com has been developed to provide Six Sigma professionals with instant access to information. Leveraging our strength and foundation in education, IQPC and the Process Excellence Network are uniquely positioned to provide a comprehensive library of webcasts gathered from our events, as well as exclusive content from leaders in the industry.