Takt time is an essential indicator that is used in lean manufacturing and can be defined as the amount of time that is allowed to develop one product to be able to meet the demand of customers. This is also known as beat of production that is used by a number of organizations as a reference point on which they target the processing times against. Taktzeit upon calculation is stated in seconds.
How to Calculate Takt Time?
In order to calculate Takt time, one will have to determine certain factors and variables which include the following:
• The daily demand value or the daily order
• The number of time units in minutes or seconds in a working day
To be able to calculate Takt time from the above mentioned variables, you will have to take the total production time per day and divide this by the daily customer demand. For example, taking eight hours of processing time per day gives 480 minutes and which further gives 28800 seconds. Now, if the demand per day is 350 widgets, then Takt time can be found by dividing the total seconds with the demand value. In this case, you will divide 28800 by 350 and will be getting 82 seconds. Since most businesses do not have a 100% running efficiency, an efficiency percentage will be applied to the working time. This will give a shorter time which means that the running pace of the production line has to be slightly faster. Beat of production is essential when it comes to making process improvements and calculating total time required for process steps.
Understanding Takt time is to understand that on any given day, the volume at which your units are produced must match that as closely as possible to the daily demand for those units by your customers. In organizations that build large products like modular building or electrical power equipment, the demand for finished products might take place over the course of weeks or months. In high-speed manufacturing environments, like bottling plants or paper mills, there can be thousands or millions of units produced per day. To meet Takt time correctly, vendors located all over the world must be able to supply components and parts at the same rate they are consumed by the primary manufacturer’s customers. The closer the vendor’s are physically located to the primary manufacturer, the easier it generally is to control this rate, however, in today’s global environment, many companies have to import components from all over the world.
Not only is it required to meet customer demand at the right time, but the suppliers and the sub suppliers must meet that same demand as well. For instance, in a production line of small modular steel boxes, the customer demand is 15 units per day. Two shifts of production total 14 hours per day. When calculating total production time, remember to subtract for breaks, lunch, meeting, 5S cleaning and many more. In order for the manufacturer to meet customer demand, each of its suppliers and sub suppliers must also meet that same demands by producing a unit at least every 56 minutes. This is how Takt time is calculated.
— Slimane Zouggari