Takt Time
Also known as takt · customer demand rate · pace of production · beat time · drumbeat · how fast must the line run
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Learning zone
Takt is German for the beat a conductor keeps, and it is the pace the customer sets rather than the pace the line can run. An eight-hour shift is 28,800 seconds; against 480 units ordered that is a 60-second takt, one unit a minute all shift. Every station is then designed to finish inside 60 seconds, and the line's job is to hold the beat, not to beat it.
The classic error is putting gross shift hours on top. Takt uses net available time: subtract breaks, planned changeovers and scheduled maintenance first. Count the two fifteen-minute breaks and the half-hour lunch and the same shift is really 25,200 seconds, giving a 52.5-second takt. Miss that and every station is designed 14% too slow, which nobody notices until the end of the month.
Running faster than takt is not a win either. Producing at 45 seconds against a 60-second demand builds inventory nobody ordered, which is overproduction, the waste that Toyota's own literature calls the worst of the seven because it hides all the others. When demand changes, takt changes, and the line is rebalanced. That is the discipline, and it is why takt is recalculated monthly rather than treated as a machine specification.
- = Takt time (s)
- = Available production time (s)
- = Customer demand in that period (units)
- Takt time — Reorder Point, Safety Stock (Statistical Buffer)
- Available production time — Machine Utilisation, Reorder Point
- Customer demand in that period — Economic Order Quantity (Wilson EOQ), Reorder Point