Lean Term: What is Takt Time? Takt Time Training + PDF

What is takt time? Lean takt time is the required pace of production to meet customer demand. Let’s define takt time as working time available divided by customer demand. The math behind calculating takt times is relatively basic. Despite its apparent simplicity, it is one of the most misunderstood terms in continuous improvement.

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In order to understand takt time, imagine that you are twelve years old, and have a paper route that you do before school every day. The papers get delivered an hour before you have to leave for school. So it would appear that you have sixty minutes available to deliver all of your papers. But if you think about it, do your really have a full hour? No.

You have to get your bike out of the garage, and load your basket up. (For the sake of this example, let’s assume that you have good balance and can roll up the newspapers on the fly.) You also have to park your bike and put away your bag when you finish your route. So that sixty minutes really turns into more like fifty.

Besides the time available, what else do you need to know to calculate the takt time for newspaper delivery? Think back to the Lean takt time definition. The other critical piece of information is how many papers you have to deliver. Let’s say you have 25 houses on your route. You now have enough information for your takt time calculation. (Remember how to calculate takt times?)

50 minutes / 25 houses = 2 minutes per paper

The amount of time you have to deliver each paper, your takt time, is 2 minutes.

You are probably already asking the obvious follow-up question: How long does it take you to deliver each paper? (The actual time it takes you is known as cycle time.) If it takes you less than two minutes, on average, you are able to meet your demand. If it takes longer, you are not going to get to school on time.

When a process is extremely stable, like on an assembly line, it is easy to pace to the takt time. The work advances at a set pace, so the product rolls off the end in very predictable increments. This isn’t the situation with a newspaper route. Believe it or not, this example is more like working in a Lean office than on a shop floor.

Why? Because there is a lot of variation. The weather. The distance between houses. Some people like the paper placed neatly on the porch. Others don’t mind having it chucked somewhere in the vicinity of the door. Some driveways are long. Some houses are close to the street. Some of your customer’s dogs are not so friendly. You get the idea.

In the office, you experience similar variation. Customers call or e-mail at random intervals. Some requests are small; some are significant. Some orders come in with one line; some are several pages long.

On a paper route, or in the office, takt time works best as an average pace. Some papers get delivered quickly; others will take longer. Some phone calls can get resolved in a flash; others take a bit more time. But the law of large numbers eventually takes over. In many processes, you will find that every cycle is different, but any group of ten cycles looks an awful lot like any other group of ten cycles.

In practice, this lets you use milestones to keep on pace. If your takt time is two minutes for a process with variable inputs, you might use an hourly milestone. You know you have to get thirty cycles done every sixty minutes. And when a team starts falling off the pace, and can recognize it early on, leaders can make plans to get back on schedule—plans that don’t include working faster.

Things get even more confusing when there are cyclical changes in demand. Imagine that your local newspaper decides to offer a ‘Sunday only’ delivery option, and 25 more houses on your route elect to get this big, unwieldy edition. Two things happen, right? First, you now have 50 minutes to deliver to 50 houses—a drastically reduced takt time of one minute. Plus, the Sunday paper is bulky and is harder to bundle up; and you just can’t carry as many on your bike. Even worse, you can’t toss a Sunday edition because the rubber band would break and create a mess. Your cycle time goes up at the same time that your takt time drops.

One option is to group your demand into different periods—a Sunday takt time and a weekday takt time. No problem. You just have to get creative on how you staff for the different periods. Fast food restaurants adjust their staff throughout the day—they know the pace picks up during mealtimes, and slows down the rest of the day. Whether they call it takt time or not, they end up matching their capacity to the required pace. On your paper route, you might do the same thing by hiring a friend to help you meet your Sunday demand, or you could work a longer shift.

It is a little different when demand shifts during a boom time, a new product release, or in an economic downturn. In these cases, it is a matter of watching for indicators, predicting future demand, and managing capacity to match the new requirements. If demand picks up and capacity doesn’t change, your company is leaving money on the table, and those customers will go elsewhere—maybe forever. On the other hand, if demand falls and capacity stays the same, the company is losing money by having excess capacity.

So, back to your paper route. Let’s assume that you want to earn more money by adding more customers to your route. Can you handle the load? The answer lies in being able to understand how fast you need to be able to work to meet the new demand.

Let’s see what happens if you add five houses to your route. Again, pull out your trusty takt time calculation (or use a takt time calculator).

50 minutes / 30 houses = 1:40 per paper

You would have to be able to deliver the paper at each house 20 seconds faster than before.

So, takt time serves to give you a real target for improvement, not just an arbitrary, made-up percentage. If it currently takes you 1:52 (112 seconds) per paper, you’d need an 11% reduction in your cycle time to meet your planned customer demand. (Cycle time is how long a process actually takes to complete. You reduce it by applying generous portions of continuous improvement and kaizen.) Goals with a specific purpose are always easier for frontline employees to get behind than annual improvement goals (i.e. improve productivity by 10% per year).

You do have some other options. What if you cut down the time it takes you to transition at the beginning and end of each route (known as setup time, or changeover)? You could increase the available time to 55 minutes instead of 50.

55 minutes / 30 houses = 1:50

Now your takt time only drops by 10 seconds to meet this new demand. Ten seconds seems much more manageable.

It should not be a big stretch to picture how the concept of takt time helps managers plan their demand and capacity in their companies.

On a side note, here’s a little trivia for you. The word ‘takt’ is a German term that comes from music, and means either (depending on who you hear it from) ‘beat’, ‘rhythm’, ‘meter’, or is the little baton that the orchestra leader holds. Regardless, it all has to do with the pace of production.

Use takt time to your advantage. Don’t get discouraged by thinking of it as something you have to keep up with. Look at it in reverse. Think of it like a contract. Once it is established, your boss should provide you with the resources and a solid process to produce at that pace.

Good leaders who understand Lean know that they can’t just adjust the pace of production without providing the necessary resources. You, in all likelihood, will have Standard Work Sheets balanced to your takt time. If your boss is asking you to go faster than this ‘contract’ says you should, he knows he is asking for trouble—poor quality, injuries, and unhappy employees who will quickly lose faith in Lean.

Use takt time to give you an early warning about problems. Train your team to let you know as soon as they see that they are falling behind schedule. This will feel unnatural to them. For years, companies have rewarded people who figure things out on their own, and ‘make things happen.’

Plus, many people have learned to keep mistakes quiet and to avoid bringing problems to their boss’s attention. For those reasons, your team will be reluctant to use an andon and call out for help when the see that they are 22 seconds behind at the 2:00 mark of a four minute takt time. If you have a culture of blame, rather than a Lean culture, they will look at it as a failure, and won’t want to let you know about it.

If you create an organization where leaders reward people for recognizing abnormal conditions, you will unleash the real power of takt time—the ability to use it to identify problems. And more importantly, you create an opportunity to use continuous improvement to fix those problems.

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