Takt Time Vs Cycle Time - Which is more important for your lean journey?

We put the call out to our Newsletter readers, on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for questions. Questions that people are struggling with around ISO, Lean or leadership that they wanted help with and we got some fantastic responses that we have loved reading through and thinking about how we can help. We can't answer everything but we'll do our best to get through as many as we can. Welcome, to the Thursday Q&A! 

This Week's Question 

This week's question comes from Ryan down in Timaru. Ryan and his company are starting out in the lean journey and want to understand should they concentrate on Takt Time or should concentrate on Cycle Time? Which one is better for the lean journey?

The Feedback

So, let's understand what Takt Time is, Takt time actually is a German word it means beat rate or pulse so that's about understanding what the customer demand is every week every day. If they want 400 widgets a week that's 80 a day which is 10 an hour so Takt time is 10 an hour. It's an externally driven measure but it's a really important one.

Cycle time well that's an internal measure that's the rate of the time it takes your process to work from the start of the first widget to start the second widget, so run through the whole cycle. Within your process you'll likely have Process A, Process B & Process C, and each one of those will have its own cycle time. 

The slowest one of those will be the bottleneck and that's going to determine the cycle time for your entire process. Now obviously, if your internal cycle time is slower than your Takt time, so it takes you more than eight hours to make 10 widgets, you're going to be late delivering to the customer or you're going to be working overtime and cost yourself more money. 

If your internal cycle time is quicker than your Takt Time then you're going to deliver faster so you end up stocking and storing that product and that's going to cost you money and create waste as well. So the idea is to try and balance your Cycle Time with your Takt Time.

Back to the original question of which one is more important where should I focus? Well firstly you have to focus on understanding the customer Takt Time. If you don't understand the customer Takt time, how can you possibly set up an internal process that's going to meet their demand? 

That results in you having to have a really good relationship with a client about understanding what they really need because their Takt Time while they're ordering 400 a week might not be 80 a day they might need 160 every two days for their process

Understanding that will dramatically alter how your internal processes work so that's where I would start. I would start really understanding my Takt Time.

That's as for another Thursday Q & A, I hope you found it useful, and you got something out of it. As always please keep sending in the questions we really love to see what people are asking and the feedback has been really great so again we really appreciate you taking the time to do that.

Got a question

We'd love to hear from you on any questions you have on ISO Management Systems, lean or leadership. Just pop your question in the section below and we'll put it into hat for things we are answering with the Thursday Q&A Sessions.