Takt Time Cycle Time. There has been an interesting discussion thread on Kaizen Continuous Improvement Experts group on Linked. In over the last few weeks on the differences between takt time and cycle time. This is one of the fundamentals Id have thought was well understood out there, along with some nuances, but I was quite surprised by the number and quality of misconceptions posted by people with lean and Sigma in their job titles. Excel Color Index, coloring of fonts, cell interiors. Cycle Count Program Excel' title='Cycle Count Program Excel' />I see two fundamental sources of confusion, and I would like to clarify each here. Dot Driver Qualification Packet/ Download Last Version'>Dot Driver Qualification Packet/ Download Last Version. Cycle Time has multiple definitions. Cycle time can mean the total elapsed time between when a customer places an order and when he receives it. This definition can be used externally, or with internal customers. This definition actually pre dates most of the English publications about the Toyota Production System. Cycle Count Program Excel' title='Cycle Count Program Excel' />It can also express the dock to dock flow time of the entire process, or some other linear segment of the flow. The value stream mapping in Learning to See calls this production lead time but some people call the same thing cycle time. In early publications about the TPS, such as Suzakis New Manufacturing Challange and Hiranos JIT Implementation Manual, the term cycle time is used to represent what, today, we call takt time. Just to confuse things more, cycle time is also used to represent the actual work cycle which may, or may not, be balanced to the takt time. We also have machine cycle time, which is the start to start time of a machine and is used to balance to a manual work cycle and, in conjunction with the batch size,  is a measure of its theoretical capacity. Cycle time is used to express the total manual work involved in a process, or part of a process. And, of course, cycle time is used to express the work cycle of a single person, not including end of cycle wait time. None of these definitions is wrong. The source of confusion is when the users have not first been clear on their context. Therefore, it is critically important to establish context when you are talking. Adjectives like operator cycle time help. Toyota Kata for the lean coaching cycle Improvement Kata, Strategic Alignment, Process Analyisis, Next Goal Setting, PDCA coaching cycle, Coaching Kata, and Excel. File Viewers. If you do not have Adobe Reader, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft Word installed on your computer, you may need to download the FREE appropriate file. Excels IF AND OR Functions are a great team. In this tutorial I show you some practicle examples of how to use them. But the main thing is to be conscious that this can be a major source of confusion until you are certain you and the other person are on the same wavelength. Takt time is often over simplified. The classic calculation for takt time is Available Minutes for Production Required Units of Production Takt Time. This is exactly right. But people tend to get wrapped up around what constitutes available time. The pure definition is usually to take the total shift times and subtract breaks, meetings, and other administrative non working time. Nobody ever has a problem with this. Maybe because that is the way Shingijutsu teaches it, and people tend to accept what Shingijutsu says at face value. So lets review and example of what we have really done here. Amazing Sims 2 House Plans there. For the sake of a simple discussion, lets assume a single 8 hour shift on a 5 day work week. There is a 12 hour unpaid lunch break in the middle of the day, so the workers are actually in the plant at work for 8 12 hours. USA, if you are in another country, it might be different for youSo we start with 8 hours 8 hours x 6. But there is a 1. This time is not production time, so it is subtracted from available minutes 4. A very common mistake at this point would be to subtract the 3. But notice that we did not include that time to start with. Subtracting it again would count it twice. So when determining takt time, we would use 4. If  leveled customer demand was 5. Note that you can just as easily do this for a week, rather than a day. All of this is very basic stuff, and I would get few arguments up to this point, so why did I go through it Because if you were to run this factory at a 5. You will have to work overtime to make up the difference, or simply choose not to make it up. Why Because there are always problems, and problems disrupt production. Those disruptions come at the expense of the 4. Then there is the fact that the plant manager called an all hands safety meeting on Thursday. That pulled 3. 0 minutes out of your production time. Almost four units of production lost there. I could go on with a myriad of examples gathered from real production floors, but you get the idea. Here is what is even worse, though. When are you going to work on improvementsIf you expect operators to do their daily machine checks, when do you expect that to happen Do you truly expect your team members to stop the line when there is a problem All of these things take time away from production. The consequence is that the shop floor leadership the ones who have to deal with the consequences of disrupted production will look at takt time as a nice theory, or a way to express a quota, but on a minute by minute level, it is pretty useless for actually pacing production. All because it was oversimplified. If you expect people to do something other than produce all day, you have to give them time to do it. Lets get back to the fundamental purpose of takt time and then see what makes sense. The Purpose of Takt Time. Here is some heresy Running to takt time is wholly unnecessary. Many factories operate just fine without even knowing what it is. What those factories lose, however, is a fine grained sense of how things are going minute by minute. Truthfully, if they have another way to immediately see disruptions, act to clear them, followed by solving the underlying problem then they are as lean as anyone. So here is the second heresy You dont NEED takt time to be lean. What you need is some way to determine the minimum resource necessary to get the job done JIT, and a way to continuously compare what is actually happening vs. This is what makes lean happen. Takt time is just a tool for doing this. It is, however, a very effective tool. It is so effective, in fact, that it is largely considered a necessary fundamental. Honestly, in day to day conversation, that is how I look at it. I made the above statements to get you to think outside the mantras for a minute. What is takt time, reallyTakt time is an expression of your customer demand normalized and leveled over the time you choose to produce. It is not, and never has been, a pure customer demand signal. Customers do not order the same quantity every day. They do not stop ordering during your breaks, or when your shift is over. What takt time does, however, is make customer demand appear level across your working day. This has several benefits. First, is it makes capacity calculations really easy through a complex flow. You can easily determine what each and every process must be capable of. You can determine the necessary speeds of machines and other capital equipment. You determine minimum batch sizes when there are changeovers involved. You can look at any process and quickly determine the optimum number of people required to make it work, plus see opportunities where a little bit of kaizen will make a big difference in productivity. More importantly, though, takt time gives your team members a way to know exactly what success looks like for each and every unit of production. This gives your team members the ability to let you know immediately if something is threatening required output. Put another way, it gives your entire team the ability to see quickly spot problems and respond to them before little issues accumulate into working on Saturday.