One of the useful concepts to master in Lean Manufacturing is the concept of Takt Time. I like to think of the Takt Time of a manufacturing process as being like the "heart beat" of the line; it's the pulse that demolishes your production plans and pumps out those units of product.
Simply put, the Takt Time of a process is the maximum amount of time needed to produce a unit of a product to meet a customer demand.
The experts at Vorne explain that takt is a German word meaning 'cadence, rhythm or time'. Their team goes on to explain opportunities to utilise Takt Time to improve manufacturing performance.
How to Use Takt Time
(Tips from Vorne)
- Improve Production Planning: When scheduling production, use historical manufacturing information to validate whether the calculated takt time is attainable. Using historical information when creating the production plan gives you an opportunity to amend your production standards to ensure that the plan is met without missed shipment dates (unhappy customer) or overproduction of parts (unhappy plant manager).
- Pace Production to Schedules: Drive a plant floor scoreboard that paces production in real-time. Each time the Takt Time elapses, the target counter should increment. Converting Takt Time into a real-time target makes it easy to instantly identify if your production is ahead or behind schedule.
- Use Efficiency to Win the Shift: Instead of focusing your plant floor team solely on OEE, focus your plant floor team on efficiency (the ratio of good pieces to target count) and give them the tools to consistently win their shift (achieving 100% efficiency).
TAKT TIME Best practices
Despite this usefulness, quite often operation teams do not have an accurate grasp of their factory heartbeat. Upon closer inspection, Takt Times can oftentimes be wildly varied and out of control.
Try these best practices to take control back to the cadence of your production:
- Use your Takt Time reading to set shift targets.
- Drive results on the plant floor with production based on Takt Time, giving your teams the opportunity to "win" their shift.
- Implement popular Takt-Time related KPI's:
Target (An automatically updated production target that increases based on Takt Time)
Actual (The current production)
Efficiency (How far ahead or behind production is running in terms of a percentage)
Start with shop floor visualisation
We want to help you monitor the heart beat on your production line to ensure that it's always fit and healthy. We can even help you set up alarms if the beat falls out of parameters, to ensure that you always get the best from your machines and meet your targets.
The first step is visualisation of targets, with an easy method via an XL Productivity Appliance installation. For a limited time, we are offering a free 90-day trial to see a real-time display of your Takt Time.
