Takt time paces production in a way that aligns it with customer demand. It is an important concept in lean manufacturing because it balances the importance of meeting customer demand with the importance of minimizing work-in-process and inventory. Think of takt time as establishing the “rhythm” or “beat” of your manufacturing process. In fact, takt is a German word that means cadence, rhythm, time, measure, bar or cycle.

In practical terms, not only does takt time establish the pace of production, it provides an easy way to see if you are ahead of schedule, behind schedule, or right on schedule. How? By using takt time to drive a real-time target for schedule adherence. A very popular plant floor scoreboard display is target (how much should have been produced thus far) versus actual (good parts actually produced), along with efficiency (the ratio of actual to target).

In practice, takt time is often used to match the pace of production to “normalized” customer demand (customer demand or estimated demand averaged over some longer period of time). Takt time is also an integral part of standardized work, as the whole idea is to establish a predictable and repeatable pace of production (i.e., standardized production).

Calculating TAKT Time

The formal calculation of takt time is:

Takt Time = Production Time / Customer Demand

Let's take this calculation apart.

Production Time is the available time for manufacturing parts. It should only include time when production is expected to be running. From the perspective of production states (Run, Unplanned Stop, Planned Stop, and Not Scheduled), Production Time only includes the first two (Run and Unplanned Stop). In other words, Production Time does not include any time where the line is expected to be stopped (e.g., it does not include lunches, breaks, changeovers, or planned maintenance).

Customer Demand is the quantity of parts to manufacture over some specified period of time to keep pace with customer orders. In practice, many companies choose to base customer demand on their expected rate of production (the customer in this case being more of an internal entity).

Takt Time is the amount of time needed to manufacture one good part, while keeping pace with customer demand (e.g., manufacturing one good part every 12.7 seconds). Delving deeper, it represents a “normalized” time. Sadly, manufacturing processes do not have a magic dial that can be arbitrarily changed every day based on customer demand. So, takt time represents what the production process needs to achieve in order to meet customer demand over some “normalized” period of time.