By the end of reading this article you will receive the following
benefits.
 

You will finally understand:

	What takt time is
	What cycle time is
	How takt time and cycle time relate to each other
	The Meaning of Life

Ok, I fibbed about the last one.......
 
One of the reasons that I've written this article for you,is that I find that when I run Lean Training Courses, Takt Time
and Cycle Time are often two of the Lean topics that seem to spook people slightly.

So without further ado let's get started ...

I'm keeping it super simple if that is alright with you.I'd like you to picture the following scene.

It's 8.00am on a cold winter's morning. You have just got up, dressed ready for work.

As you head out the door you think to yourself " Mmm... I really fancy a nice cup of coffee..."

You soon arrive at the Leankaffee Coffee Emporium for your daily fix of caffeine
( Leankaffee is a fictional business that I have created for dramatic effect. It is not related to any real business)

There are two staff behind the counter. Their names are Andrea and George.

Today Andrea and George are going to produce your skinny latte with chocolate on top, with Italian 6 inch bread and some relish with melted cheese, green salad and no gherkins and no I don't want to go large... with some ketchup as well.. and can I have the orange free glass as we already have 3 of the blue ones and four of the green.

Sorry, I think I'm getting the Leankaffee confused again, and have turned this into a comment on western life in today's hustle and bustle of everyday food preparation and commerce. Anyway...

Andrea's main task in the process is to write customer orders down.
 
So you can imagine lots of other customers coming in. The first one
may take her twenty five seconds. The next one may take her forty
seconds. The next one may take her thirty two seconds. If we were
to look at all of these different cycle times we could average them
out as say what is the lowest repeatable time it takes Andrea to
do that job.

Having studied this, it turns out that it is about thirty seconds.

So let's just imagine for a moment that Andrea is doing this ordering task and that it is on average taking her
thirty seconds. So the cycle time for Andrea's task is thirty seconds.

The next person I meet is George.

George's main task is to take the order from Andrea and then
actually produce the cup of coffee. I could observe George making
my coffee, to establish the overall cycle time.

We could observe the process over several customers to work out
the lowest repeatable time. In this case George's lowest repeatable
cycle time for making a cup of coffee is 90 seconds.

Congratulations.....

We've just achieved our first objective together.. Understanding cycle time.

So let's move swiftly on and tackle our second objective:  Understanding Takt Time

Takt is a German word and it literally means "The beat rate of an Orchestra"

In Lean terms we talk about the beat rate of a process. i.e. at what pace does the process have to be producing the goods orservices to meet customer demand.

To calculate the Takt Time there are two pieces of information we need :

The first is the average demand during a given time period.

The second is the time we have available to meet that demand

Let's head back to the Leankaffee to explain what I mean.Let's look at Andrea's and George's activities again, in
particular the time that they have available to serve customers.To keep things simple we are going to look at their busy period from eight am to nine am.

During this time Andrea and George have no breaks scheduled.So the time they have available is sixty minutes.

We have just got the first piece of information that we require to calculate the Takt Time.
 
The Time Available, which is sixty minutes.

So the next piece of information that we need to get is the customer demand on Andrea and George between eight
am and nine am.

A steady stream of customers comes in for coffee during that one hour period.

In fact a total of sixty customers arrived in the cafe.

I am making this maths so simple for you......

We now have the second piece of information that we require to calculate the takt time.
 
The Customer Demand is sixty during our given time period between eight am and nine am.

So after you have performed this well so far I suppose I better reveal to you the secret of how to calculate the
Takt Time.

It is really quite simple:

So in the Leankaffee example Andrea and George have sixty minutes available to work on their tasks.

And they have sixty customers worth of demand during that same period.

So Ladies and Gentleman I can tell that you are very excited at this stage...

Queue the dramatic music....

There is a long delay as the presenter  waits to reveal the answer to the talentless contestants....

" THE TAKT TIME IS...... "

60 minutes divided by 60 customers which is One minute

So, we have calculated the Takt Time to be sixty seconds

In our Leankaffe example that would mean that every sixty seconds a customer would be requesting a cup of coffee
and we would need to provide that coffee if we are to meet demand.

Very good Mr Ross...

Yes it is exactly like that in real life isn't it...

Every sixty seconds a person comes in for a cup of coffee....

I DON'T THINK SO.....

Ok,ok calm down...

This is just an over simplified example to give you the concept.

I know this Leankaffee example does not work on so many levels
but the good news is that .....

We are almost done.

We've talked about Takt Time and Cycle Time, now the last piece of the jigsaw is to combine these two ideas
together.

So let's construct our Takt Time versus Cycle Time Chart back at the Leankaffee.

The first thing to do is get a piece of A4 paper.

Draw a chart with an x axis (along the bottom) and y axis (y is the vertical one)

Add an appropriate scale to the y axis showing 30, 60 and 90 seconds
 
Draw a horizontal line at 60 seconds going from left to right across the page

This is the takt time.

 
Move along the x axis a bit then draw a vertical line on the x axis to
match up with 30 seconds .This is the cycle time for Andrea

Move along the x axis a bit more then draw a vertical line on the x axis to
match up with 90 seconds. This is the cycle time for George.

You have just completed your Takt Time Cycle Time Chart for the Leankaffee process. Well done...

So let's look at your chart.
 
Any obvious problems.
 
Well I hope you can see that George is the problem!

I really don't know why we hired him.
 
I never like him from day one with his strange ways, and his constant texting in the workplace.

Sorry about that outburst...
 
It is nothing to do with George!
 
90 seconds just happens to be the time that it takes to do that particular task.

If Andrea, (she is my favourite, such a nice girl) were making the coffee she would take 90 seconds as well.
 

No the real problem is that we have a demand every 60 seconds and we can currently can only meet that
demand every 90 seconds.
 

So here is the million dollar question?

 
Is there any way that we can balance the work,so that Angela has
60 seconds of work and George also has 60 seconds of work?
 
 
If we can achieve this then we will have a balanced process set up
to meet Takt Time.

	This may involve re-training
	This may involve moving the equipment
	This may be difficult to do

In Conclusion

Hopefully you now understand takt time, Cycle time and how they
relate to each other in terms of creating a balanced efficient process.

The use of cycle time/ takt time works best in situations where the
work is repetitive and the average demand is predictable.

Watch the video about Takt Time and Cycle Time