Metrics & analysisTakt Time

What is Takt time?

Takt time is the rhythm of customer demand: the available production time divided by customer demand in the same period. If 400 parts must be delivered in a shift with 480 available minutes, the takt is 1.2 minutes per part.

Takt is not a measure of how fast you can produce, but how fast you must: processes faster than takt create overproduction; processes slower than takt create backlogs. Balancing against takt reveals which stations really constrain.

Takt presupposes reasonably levelled demand (heijunka) — if demand swings wildly from day to day, the takt swings with it, and balancing becomes impossible.

Related concepts

Cycle time

Cycle time is the time a process actually takes per part — from one part being finished to the next being finished. Compared with the takt time, cycle time shows whether a station can keep up with customer demand.

Heijunka

Heijunka is the levelling of production in both volume and product mix over time, so operations run in a steady rhythm rather than in bursts. Instead of producing Monday’s orders on Monday, an average of demand is produced each day.

Flow

Flow means an item or a case moves through the process without stops, accumulation or waiting. Perfect flow is one-piece production: each item is processed and passed on immediately.

Bottleneck

The bottleneck is the process in a chain with the lowest capacity, which thereby limits the throughput of the entire system. An hour lost at the bottleneck is an hour lost for the whole factory — capacity gained everywhere else is an illusion.

From concept to practice

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