In lean manufacturing, there is a rhythm, a beat, that guides the production processes. This rhythm—measured in Takt Time—is the heartbeat of factories worldwide.
In this blog post, we explore Takt time and how to use it to strengthen your manufacturing processes.
How to Calculate Takt Time to Meet Customer Demand
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat is Takt Time?
Takt time is the rate at which you should produce goods to fulfill customer demand without overproducing or underproducing.
Originating in the 1930s with the German aircraft industry, the word “Takt” means ‘rhythm’ or ‘beat.’ Since then, the metric has been adopted by several manufacturing organizations after being popularized by the Toyota production system.
In the lean production system, Takt time is a simple concept that keeps the production line in harmony with customer needs, ensuring all stakeholders are satisfied.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Calculate Takt Time?
The formula for Takt time is Takt time = Available production time/customer demand.
You divide how much time you can spend making the product by how many products you need to make. You can adjust any of the three variables to optimize business outcomes.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you run a quaint bakery in the heart of Paris. You, the baker, must know precisely how often you must prepare a croissant to satisfy the morning rush without overburdening the ovens or wasting resources. Here’s how you’d do that.
Step 1: Determine customer demand
Customer demand is the external factor you have little control over. So, begin there. Understand how many croissants your customers need at what times of the day.
For instance, breakfast and tea time might be more of a rush for croissants than lunch or dinner. On the other hand, if you’re running a bicycle manufacturing business, your demand might be higher in summer than when it snows. As a business owner/manager, you’re in the best place to measure this.
So, determine your customer demand in the number of units you need to produce. Let’s say your customer demand is 1120 croissants.
Step 2: Calculate your available production time
Available production time is in your control, depending on your capacity, machinery, team size, etc. To track the granular details of how much each process is taking or what the productivity of each employee is, try a time tracking software for small businesses.
For now, let’s take a simple example. If your team is one person working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and takes an hour off each day for breaks/meetings, you have 35 hours available each week.
(1 baker * 8 hours * 5 days) – (1 hour * 5 days)
If you have four bakers equally sharing two 8-hour shifts, all seven days, without a break, you have 224 hours available each week.
(8 hours * 7 days * 4 bakers)
Step 3: Apply the Takt time formula
Takt time = Available production time/Customer demand
In this example, the Takt time of your croissant’s bakery is 224/1120 = 0.2 or 1/5th of an hour.
This means that if you prepare a croissant in 12 minutes, you will effectively satisfy customer demand. Knowing this will help your bakers plan their time. If it’s impossible to knead the dough, make the bun, and bake it, too, you’ll either settle for not meeting customer demand or hire more bakers!
Takt time in relation to other time metrics
If you’ve worked in manufacturing, you’ve heard about a bunch of time-related metrics, such as lead time, touch time, cycle time, etc. In project time management, these metrics interlock with each other. But how do they relate to Takt time? Let’s find out.
- Lead time: Time from when an order is placed until it’s delivered
- Touch time: Time workers are touching the product, i.e., adding value
- Cycle time: Time it takes to complete one cycle of production from start to finish
Let’s go back to the example of croissants.
Lead time
Lead time is the time between when a customer orders a croissant and receiving it. In this case, the croissants are prepared in advance and kept ready for orders, so the lead time might be a matter of seconds. However, the lead time might be much longer if you make custom cakes in the same bakery.
The key difference between lead and Takt time is that the former includes paperwork, processing, packaging, etc., while the latter is typically just the production time.
Touch time
Touch time is from when the baker receives the raw materials to when they pile the batch of croissants on the tray. Any time management tool you use for your business will easily capture this information.
Touch time is only that part of the production process when the team/machinery is actively working on it—i.e., the value creation process. Takt time includes all the waiting and moving time as well.
For instance, if the baker needs 10 minutes to prepare the dough but has to wait 10 minutes for the kitchen table to be ready to use, the Takt time is 20 minutes, but the Touch time is 10 minutes.
Cycle time
Cycle time is the average time bakers take to produce the croissants.
Cycle time = Available production time/actual units of production
Takt time compares capacity to demand, while cycle time compares capacity to actuals.
If that sounds like too many metrics to calculate, here’s why you should pay attention to Takt time.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits and Limitations of Takt Time
Takt time acts as a guideline for what you need to complete in the time you have to meet market demand. This can apply far beyond manufacturing.
If you’re a content writer working 8 hours a day, and the demand for your service is 2 articles a day, you need to write one article every 4 hours, which is your Takt time.
If you’re in construction and get commissions to build two houses each year, your Takt time is 6 months. A good construction time tracking software should tell you if your work can be completed in that time with the given capacity.
Takt time helps businesses understand when, how much, and how often to produce. Here’s how that helps.
Benefits of Takt time
Aligning production to demand: Aligning your output to customer demand will prevent over- or under-production.
Eliminating wastage: Takt time considers the maximum number of units you can sell in any given time period. With this knowledge, you can eliminate wastage by producing the correct number, ordering the right amount of raw materials, employing the precise number of people, and so on.
Improving predictability: Customer demand acts as an anchor for the production process. It helps predict how much you can sell and how much raw materials/team capacity/machine time you need. This ensures you identify and mitigate risks in advance.
Improvement of productivity: Takt time tells you exactly how productive you need to be to maximize revenue. This helps business leaders and facility managers optimize their resources.
For instance, if one baker can not make 280 croissants in a day, they are unproductive and need some form of intervention.
If you’re a software engineering team, use time tracking software for developers to identify Takt time and allocate resources more optimally to achieve Takt time.
Enhancing quality assurance: Takt time tends to be tight, so production managers must set clear quality assurance standards. It helps operationalize production so quality standards are held.
Optimization of program performance: Takt time helps harmonize various production elements, from inventory levels and workforce allocation to resource scheduling.
As with every metric, Takt time also has some limitations. Let’s explore them.
Limitations of Takt time
Rigidity in dynamic markets: In industries where customer demand can change as quickly as the weather, the rigidity of Takt time can become a limitation. It’s like planning a picnic weeks in advance, only to have it rain. Without the flexibility to adjust swiftly, the system can struggle.
Overemphasis on uniformity: Takt time assumes a certain uniformity by considering average demand and average production time. In reality, demand is rarely stable.
Assuming control: Takt time assumes that several factors, such as employee availability, machinery uptime, etc., can be controlled, which is often not the case.
Despite its limitations, Takt time is a great tool for optimizing production across industries, products, and services. Here are some practical steps for implementing Takt time correctly.
Summarize this article for me pleaseImplementing Takt Time in Projects
Implementing Takt time in projects can turn chaotic workflows into efficient ones, but it does require careful orchestration and robust product management software like ClickUp. Consider the following step-by-step guide to help you on your implementation journey.
Step 1: Understand the rhythm of your customer demand
Customer demand is rarely uniform. You need to understand its ebbs and flows to gauge and project demand. If you’re using ClickUp as your production management tool, you can see the trends visually.
ClickUp Dashboard can be customized to visualize sales, order activity, revenue trends, and more. You can also compare this against goals and KPIs.
Step 2: Track availability across processes
Calculating ‘available production time’ includes tracking a number of things, such as:
Machinery availability: If you’re on a shared production line, you need information about when the machinery is available.
Team availability: What work do your employees currently have, and when are they available? ClickUp time tracking enables team members to track their work at a granular level. The workload view gives you a big picture of this metric across all team members.
Material availability: When does your raw material come in? If your team is available before raw materials are here, you’ll waste their time. To map such dependencies effectively, the ClickUp Gantt chart view is ideal.
You can use a daily planner app to track all these metrics and calculate your available production time. These time log templates can also help bring all information together to make informed decisions.
Step 3: Calculate Takt time
Takt time is available production time divided by customer demand. Use the ClickUp Formula Fields to calculate Takt time. Add progress against goals to the dashboard.
Schedule your project to achieve your Takt time. Always keep an eye on how you’re performing against customer demand.
If you’re new to project management, here are some ClickUp project schedule templates to get you started.
Step 4: Identify bottlenecks and optimize performance
The thing about Takt time is that you won’t meet all demand. For instance, instead of 1120, if the customer demand for croissants is 5,000, your Takt time is 2.4 minutes, which is nearly impossible to achieve.
The goal of Takt time is not to force yourself to achieve it but to use it to optimize your performance. So, if your demand increases, you can:
Accept your situation: Settle for meeting only a part of the customer demand you can. While this keeps the business steady, it also leaves a significant opportunity out.
Increase capacity: Invest in additional machinery or people capacity to increase production time. For instance, if the mixer takes too long to prepare the dough, you can identify that as a bottleneck and replace the mixer.
Redesign product: If the current product takes too long, you can redesign it without affecting customer experience. For instance, you can reduce the size of the croissant to make more units with the same raw material.
Automate: Assembly lines are a perfect example of automation. If you’re not ready to set up an assembly line in your bakery, try simple automation for billing, purchases, etc.
ClickUp Automations offers 100+ templates for streamlining workflows, routine tasks, project handoffs, and more.
Summarize this article for me pleaseAchieve Your Takt Time Goals With ClickUp
Takt time is a great metric far beyond manufacturing. It’s a fundamental rhythm that can orchestrate success across various industries, from the bustling floors of factories to the dynamic software development spaces. It helps synchronize the market with your capacity.
ClickUp project management tool helps observe, track, measure, and achieve Takt time goals. With features for time tracking, reporting, dashboards, and calculations, ClickUp powers lean management processes effectively.
Whether you’re in the construction business or software development, ClickUp’s operations management capabilities power efficiency and productivity. Experience it for yourself.
Summarize this article for me pleaseFAQs About Takt Time
1. What is the difference between Takt time and cycle time?
Cycle time is the average time it currently takes to produce the completed product. Takt time is the rate at which you should produce goods to fulfill customer demand.
Takt time compares capacity to demand, while cycle time compares capacity to actuals.
- Cycle time = Available production time/actual units of production
- Takt time = Available production time/customer demand
2. What is the formula for calculating takt time?
Takt Time = Available production time/Customer demand
3. What is tach time in production?
Tach time is an aeronautical term for measuring the strain an aircraft engine has endured. It is often confused with Takt time, which is a manufacturing term.
Takt time is the ideal production rate to fulfill customer demand without over/under-producing.
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