Takt-Times

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Takt times are a German concept, often this is described as being a ‘drumbeat’.

The basic concept for takt times is quite a simple procedure, you take a look at what your output requirements are for the next say 3 months (increase this if you have long lead times), base this against the available production you have as well as finished stock, raw materials and wip to generate a production figure that needs to be achieved within the next three months.

You would then have a target output figure, which can be broken down further into monthly or weekly targets, this will give you an idea against which your optimal batch size can be viewed. Remember to ask the machine operators what they view the optimal batch sizes should be. Reducing the batch size in a production run means, freeing up machine resources, reduced inventory, and staggering material into different areas to achieve a much more even flow. Ask departments which rely on your section for work and those sections which support yours, for advice on setting up optimal batch sizes.

Most companies would use this method on the machine that has the biggest bottleneck. Takt-times work best when applied to a complete production process rather than simply looking at your immediate bottleneck.

Where there is a particularly fast moving production line, for example you have several operators on a conveyor/work desk fitting a component to a product calculating tack-times is a relatively simple matter of looking at the time taken by each operator, to fit or complete a task

BENEFITS: The benefits of using Takt-times include greater throughput as targets are set against the quantity of components being processed.

Look at any given machine on your process line and spend say a shift sitting beside the machine to see how many components/processes are completed by the operator, this will give you details of what your daily output targets should be, takt-times must assume constant set up times. The daily output targets should be modified if your business runs more than a single shift, and then be multiplied against your working week, you may have a 3 shift 6/7 working week. Please allow for a 10% idle period which will arise from shift changeovers. You should now be in a position to have a takt-time for a machine for any given week, If you set the takt-time as a chart you should be able to show the operators what their weekly target for output is and let them mark the figure down daily so everyone involved with the process/machine know if the operators are achieving targets. If your aim is to bite into a backlog of work then it may be advisable to set higher than determined takt-times.

DISADVANTAGES: Takt-times do not take tooling changes and machine breakdowns into consideration.

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