Takt Time Free Video

This video shows how to calcute takt time, how to determine the correct amount of people needed and how to balance the load evenly. At the bottom of this page is an offer for a free guide to Takt time that goes into more details.

Takt Time as a manufacturing measure

Takt time was initially used as a manufacturing management tool in Germany's aircraft industry 80 years ago.  Takt is a German word for a specific period of time such as a musical indicator.  It measured the interval airplanes were moved forward to the next stage in the manufacturing process.  This idea was extensively used at Toyota in the 1950s and was in general right through the Toyota supply base by the late 1960s. Toyota usually analyses the Takt Time for a process each month.

To be more precise, "Takt" is a German word for the baton that orchestra conductors use to control the rate, beat or timing that musicians play their instruments.  Throughout the 1930s, Germany and Japan were part of the Axis, and German engineers helped organize Japan's airplane industry. They used the conductor's baton as an analogy for setting the tempo for the whole orchestra.  When World Wat II ended, Toyota adopted both the word and theory for its Production System.

Takt time might be measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, or even weeks and uses the following formula:  Net Available Production Time / Required Output Rate

If you have a Takt Time of two minutes – that means every two minutes a complete product must have been manufactured.  However, production workers can never sustain 100% efficiency and there may also be stoppages for other factors, so allowances should be made for these instances and you have to set up your manufacturing process to operate at a proportionally quicker rate to factor this in. 

Consequently, Production Takt Time measures the maximum amount of time tolerated for a finished product to be completed to fulfil customer demand and includes a cushion for human factors and other interruptions.

If customers’ demand changes for extensive periods, then the Takt Time should be varied accordingly.  If you're manufacturing to a Takt Time of 3 minutes for each component completed every two minutes and the customer demand reduces to one every 6 minutes (i.e. demand has fallen), then your revised Takt Time is 6 minutes and production staffing levels should be revised and changed to account for this.   Fewer resources are likely to be needed to fulfil the reduced demand of one part completed every 6 minutes.  The target is to maintaining manufacturing levels to Takt Time using an optimal staff numbers. 

10 hours production time available per day / 200 units of customer demand per day = 3 min Takt Time

14 hours production time available per day / 140 units of customer demand per day  = 6 min Takt Time

Another word that is often associated with Takt Time is Cadence. This word is frequently adopted in engineering or project management environment where there isn't such an obvious or reliable rate of customer demand rate and the “available working time” isn't obvious either because employees do not record their time. 

Cadence is basically the rate (or to adopt a music analogy, rhythm) of the process or project. To establish the cadence, the entire amount of lead time for the process is divided into suitable time segments and milestones are established. Resources are managed appropriately to achieve the process or project cadence. The variance between Takt Time and Cadence is that customer demand drives Takt Time whereas schedule is driven by Cadence.

Takt Time Calculator