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A healthy heartbeat is regular and reliable, keeping all of the systems in your body working as they should.  At the core of your body’s function, your heart adjusts to sleep, exercise, and different demands you require.

Just as your heart beats to your needs, a successful business beats to the needs of customers.

By knowing customer demands, you can establish a regular beat to deliver what they need, when they need it.   This heartbeat is also known as takt time.

Takt time prevents waste and keeps customers happy.

When you go out to a nice restaurant, you expect to wait a bit for your food to be prepared.  However, if it’s 20 – 30 minutes after you ordered and you still haven’t gotten your appetizers, you will likely never visit or recommend that restaurant again.  The restaurant is not delivering consistently to your needs.

There is no steady heartbeat, which can happen from one or both of the following:

Producing ahead of time

Producing ahead of time means spending time and money on something that no one yet needs.  Your efforts could have been better spent doing something else.  Also, any excess inventory requires that it’s stored somewhere and later retrieved; costing more time and money.

In the case of the restaurant, this could mean that it is overstaffed with servers or chefs waiting to work or that excess food is already prepared and must be stored until it is needed.

Falling behind

Falling behind can cause the chaotic scramble to complete a last-minute request, which can require overtime or costs to rush a request (e.g. express shipping).  This is inefficient and may impact the quality of what is delivered or delivery may be late.

This issue is most visible to the customer.  In the restaurant example, this means that food may be rushed to delivery and not prepared as it should be or that the customer is left waiting.

Establishing a Takt Time

Knowing the average demand and the takt time helps to plan for success.

With the restaurant, history can be used to determine the customers’ demand for a given time period.  For example, on Mondays there may be less staff working and food on hand than there would be on Fridays.  By knowing the average demand, the restaurant can plan accordingly and set the beat; delivering in regular intervals and meeting customer needs.

How to Find Takt Time

Takt time is the average time needed to meet a customer’s demand within a given period.  It can apply to any repeated process, where customers are both internal (e.g. report or presentation request) or external (e.g. request for a finished product or service).

Here’s the formula:

Takt time = Net Time Available to Work Within a Given Period / Demand Within a Given Period

Examples:

If you’re like me, your eyes may gloss over when you see formulas, so here are some examples:

Let’s say you serve an average of 30 customers a week with your lawn mowing business.  In a 40 hour week, you would need to spend 1 hour and 20 minutes (40 hours / 30 customers) or less mowing a single customer’s lawn.

Or let’s say the demand for processing invoices is 50 per 8 hour day.  This means that each invoice can take no longer than 9.6 minutes (8 hours x 60 minutes / 50 invoices) to process.  This solves for the maximum time that can be taken per each unit demanded.

You can also flip the formula by putting demand on top and time on the bottom.  In the case of the invoices, you would need to complete 6.25 invoices per hour (50 invoices / 8 hours available) to meet the demand.  This solves for the demand that is required in a given time period.

How to Use Takt Time

Once you’ve found the takt time, set up your processes, people, and resources accordingly so you can deliver to that interval.  Your goal is to deliver as close to the takt time as possible – delivering too early would cause excess and too late would cause delays.

Having a takt time target can help you to evaluate your processes and make them as efficient as possible.  Also, once you are delivering at a regular rate, you can more easily find and fix bottlenecks – the issues that cause you to miss the takt time or over-deliver.

Understand that takt time is an estimate.  You are planning as best as you can with the information you have, but sometimes there may be more or less demand than you expected.  Regardless of these fluctuations, a consistent approach to meeting the needs of customers will result in less waste and more on-time deliveries – something that everyone can depend on.