Calculating takt time

The Heartbeat of Your Process

Takt time is the rate at which you need to produce output to meet customer demand. It is the heartbeat of a lean process — every stage should operate at or near takt time.

The formula

Takt Time = Available Production Time / Customer Demand

For example, if you have 480 minutes of available production time per day (8 hours) and customer demand is 240 units per day:

Takt Time = 480 / 240 = 2 minutes per unit

This means you need to produce one unit every 2 minutes to keep up with demand.

Available time adjustments

Available production time should account for planned downtime:

Subtract break times
Subtract planned maintenance windows
Subtract shift meetings or start-up time

Do not subtract unplanned downtime — that is waste to be eliminated, not accepted.

Using takt time on your VSM

Draw a horizontal takt time line across your value stream map. Stages with cycle times above the line are bottlenecks that cannot keep up with demand. Stages well below the line have excess capacity.

Balancing to takt

The goal is to balance all stages so their cycle times are as close to takt time as possible. Strategies include:

Combining stages that are well below takt time.
Splitting stages that exceed takt time into parallel operations.
Reducing changeover time at bottleneck stages.
Improving uptime at constrained resources.

In MapVS