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Posted by Javeria Rahim
Let’s assume you get an order for making 8000 units of switchboard in 15 days. Your manufacturing plant’s current production is 600 switchboards per eight-hour work shift. Do you think you will be able to achieve this target and complete the order on time?
Before you take an order for a customer, you need to know if you can fulfill it and Takt time can help you in this regard.
Takt time is the basic beat that your manufacturing plant needs to follow to meet customers’ needs without overproducing or underproducing. It tells you how much time you can spend on producing a single unit to complete your target. Takt time calculations are critical to the day-to-day running of your manufacturing plant as they help reduce the waste of resources, time, and motion.
For calculation, you need to know two things:
1- Available Production time
2- Customer’s demand
Available Production Time
The first thing you need to know is your plant’s available production time during a specific period such as day or a month. Production time will exclude the time that workers use to take breaks for lunch, meetings, or general rest time from work.
Customer’s Demand
It is the number of products that your customer demands from your manufacturing plant in a specific time period.
Formula to Calculate the Takt Time
Here is how you can calculate takt time:
Takt Time = Available Production Time / Customer’s Demand
As an example, let’s consider a manufacturing plant has an available production time of around 800 minutes. Now a new client gives an order to make 500 units of a switch. Let’s calculate the takt time for this order:
Takt Time: 800 minutes / 500 units
Takt Time: 1.6 minutes per unit
Now, you must produce a unit every 1.6 minutes to meet your customer demand.
When you have cycle time, why do you even need to calculate takt time? To understand its importance, you need to know the relationship between takt time and cycle time. Ideally, your cycle time should be less than or equal to takt time. If the cycle time is lower, it means you’re producing units fast enough to meet customer demand. If cycle time is higher, it might indicate bottlenecks or inefficiencies that need improvement. So, in short you can consider takt time as the benchmark for your production process.
Takt time calculations help you plan out the different parts of your assembly line and align them with customers’ demands. With Takt time you can:
Both takt time and cycle time are important concepts in manufacturing. However, both metrics address different aspects of production. Takt time is determined by customer demand and total production time while cycle time is the actual production time. Here are some key differences between the two:
Cycle Time
Cycle time focuses on the actual production process and represents the average time it takes to complete a single unit from start to finish including wait times, setup times, and processing times. Cycle time helps you identify bottlenecks in your assembly line and consequently helps streamline your assembly line. With cycle time knowledge, you can predict how long it will take you to make an ‘x’ number of units.
Takt Time
Takt time represents the ideal production rate based on customer demand. It doesn’t affect the actual production time. You can use it to manipulate the assembly line to optimize it according to customer demand. Since you already know how long it takes to make the perfect product, you can focus on keeping the processes that add value to the product and remove the ones that do not. You can also reduce any inefficiencies that you find in the collected data.
There are two apparent factors that affect takt time: available production time and customer demand. However, there are several other factors that have an indirect impact. Let’s see how:
Downtime
You need to consider downtime as it affects production time. It is a part of the routine and completely unavoidable. Downtime can include:
Production Schedule Variations
Sometimes unplanned issues pop up out of nowhere including variations in customer’s demands for a product, or raw material availability.
Number of Workers and Machines
The availability of manpower and machinery directly impacts production capacity. Limited resources can constrain production speed, potentially extending takt time.
Production Complexity
Complex products with intricate processes naturally take longer to produce as they involve numerous steps and specialized techniques. Each step adds to the overall processing time needed to complete the product, which can lead to a longer takt time compared to simpler products with shorter production cycles.
One of the most important applications of takt time in manufacturing is in line balancing. Here is how it helps:
Determining Workstation Cycle Times: The first step is to compare the cycle time of each workstation with the takt time. Ideally, the cycle time of each workstation on the assembly line should match or be a multiple of the takt time.
Identifying Imbalances: The next step is to identify the imbalances. Workstations with cycle times significantly longer than the takt time are potential bottlenecks that need to be addressed. Conversely, workstations with cycle times shorter than the takt time may have excess capacity that could be reallocated to other processes or used for additional tasks.
Adjusting Workloads: To balance the assembly line, adjustments are made to the workload at each workstation. These can include redistributing tasks, optimizing workflows, or reallocating resources to ensure that cycle times align more closely with the takt time. The goal is to achieve a smooth and continuous flow of production throughout the entire assembly line.
While the calculations is easy, it is much more difficult to manually readjust assembly lines. Kaizen Copilot makes it easier for industrial engineers to balance assembly lines based on different takt times. The AI-powered continuous improvement solution eliminates most of the manual tasks, making it easier for industrial engineers to speed up continuous improvement projects. All users need to do is upload a video of a single cycle and Kaizen Copilot takes it from there.
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