TAKT Time

In Lean, TAKT Time is the rate at which a finished product needs to be completed in order to meet customer demand. If a company has a takt time of five minutes, that means every five minutes a complete product, assembly or machine is produced off the line because on average a customer is buying a finished product every five minutes. The sell rate – every two hours, two days or two weeks – is the takt time.

The Importance of TAKT Time

Defining TAKT time is crucial for optimizing a team’s capacity. It is important for reducing the waste of your process. Takt time can help you maintain a continuous flow of work and reduce Mura (unevenness) in your workflow. Nonetheless, takt time is valuable for optimizing storage costs as it will help you avoid overproduction. Takt time is one of the most important Lean metrics. By defining takt time for your workflow you can:

• Establish a continuous flow of work.
• Optimize your capacity to meet customer demand.
• Reduce storage costs by avoiding overproduction.

TAKT Time - Benefits and Downsides

Benefits
Once a Takt System is implemented there are a number of benefits:

• The product moves along a line, so bottlenecks (stations that need more time than planned) are easily identified when the product does not move on in time.
• Correspondingly, stations that don't operate reliably (suffer frequent breakdown, etc.) are easily identified.
• The takt leaves only a certain amount of time to perform the actual value added work. Therefore, there is a strong motivation to get rid of all non value-adding tasks (like machine set-up, gathering of tools, transporting products, etc.)
• Workers and machines perform sets of similar tasks, so they don't have to adapt to new processes every day, increasing their productivity.
• There is no place in the takt system for removal of a product from the assembly line at any point before completion, so opportunities for shrink and damage in transit are minimized.

Downsides
Downsides of Takt time organization include:

• When customer demand rises so much that takt time has to come down, quite a few tasks have to be either reorganized to take even less time to fit into the shorter takt time, or they have to be split up between two stations (which means another station has to be squeezed into the line and workers have to adapt to the new setup)
• When one station in the line breaks down for whatever reason the whole line comes to a grinding halt, unless there are buffer capacities for preceding stations to get rid of their products and following stations to feed from. A built-in buffer of three to five percent downtime allows needed adjustments or recovery from failures.
• Short takt time can put considerable stress on the "moving parts" of a production system or subsystem. In automated systems/subsystems, increased mechanical stress increases the likelihood of breakdown, and in non-automated systems/subsystems, personnel face both increased physical stress (which increases the risk of repetitive motion (also "stress or "strain") injury), intensified emotional stress, and lowered motivation, sometimes to the point of increased absenteeism.
• Tasks have to be leveled to make sure tasks don't bulk in front of certain stations due to peaks in workload. This decreases the flexibility of the system as a whole.
• The concept of takt time doesn’t account for human factors such as an operator needing an unexpected bathroom break or a brief rest period between units (especially for processes involving significant physical labor). In practice, this means that the production processes must be realistically capable of operation above peak takt and demand must be leveled in order to avoid wasted line capacity