In continuous improvement, there is something called takt time. Takt is a German word used to indicate the beat of the music. In CI, we used it to designate the rhythm or beat of a process. It is intended to tell us the rhythm or cadence at which a product or service should be completed. In other words, how much time between units. With takt, we try to accomplish two things. One is to produce anything more than what the customer needs. The second is to avoid inventory.
Take time calculation
One challenge to accomplish this is that we never know for sure how much the customer demand will be. Looking at numbers in real-time is the fastest and better indicator of whether things are going as expected. Historical data tells you what you can expect. By comparing this number against what you are selling, you can adjust the inventory. You can increase, decrease, or even stop before you have too little or too many. If you are flexible, you can even swap your focus to the item that is selling more. What does any of this have to do with takt time?
Takt is the available time divided by customer demand. The resulting number tells you how often you need to complete one product or service. It provides some cadence to the process. Be aware that takt is not the same as cycle time. Cycle time is how much time it takes to complete the product or service. Let’s see an example of how you can use it.
Example of how to calculate takt time
In Breakfast 24, a cafe that serves sandwiches and breakfast all day. The owner knows that their high-demand days are Tuesday to Thursday. Those days, they sell between 70 to 80 sandwiches during the first four hours of the morning. They prepare and have ready some components for the sandwiches, like lettuce, tomato, bacon, and others. They don’t want to cut too much lettuce and tomatoes because they want to cut them as close as possible to the time the customer requests them. Not everybody likes salad on their morning sandwich. Historical data said that 45% of their customers do. With those numbers, they calculated a takt time for those 4 hours. To satisfy customer demand, the kitchen needs to complete a sandwich with salad every 7 minutes.
On average, every 7 minutes, a customer requests a sandwich with salad. If they want to have enough lettuce and tomato for, let’s say, the next 30 minutes, they need to prepare enough for four sandwiches (30 ÷ 7 = 4.29). If they want to have enough for one hour, they need enough salad for 8 to 9 sandwiches.
Each hour, they have a visual cue that tells the cook helper if they are selling what they expect or more. If one day, sales are slower, when the helper comes back to prepare more, he will see that they still have inventory, so he will prepare salad just enough to complete eight, not the entire batch of eight. If, on the contrary, they are selling more than expected, the cook will notice that he used all the inventory in half an hour, and he will ask the second helper to prepare more. The inventory number that will trigger the request, as well as who will be responsible to prepare it are part of the standard work for that task.
Standard Work, Inventory Control, and Demand
Takt is a number to use as a reference to learn about the process demand. Standard work has three components, job sequence to complete the job, how often needs to complete the product or service to meet customer demand (takt time), and the amount of work in process inventory. Every cook helper will follow the same standard work, which means that all of them will follow the same steps in the same order, and they know how often they need to prepare the amount of salad inventory and how much. That is how you can control inventory using takt time. If you don’t like the German word, call it something else, it does not matter. The important thing is that you are not creating any more inventory than what you need.