Understanding Takt Time in the Modern Office

Transcription

1 Using Multiple Takt Times to Meet Customer Demand

2 Just-in-Time and the Office In many offices, balancing workloads and resources can be a challenging prospect. Often, the work being done is multi-faceted and difficult to categorize. To assist in balancing efforts, there exists a wellknown and widely used system in Lean known as Just-in-Time.

3 The Elements of JIT Becoming a Just-in-Time Office means learning and implementing the concepts encapsulated within the Just-in-Time system. These are the concepts of Takt Time, Flow, and Pull. Each of these concepts interacts with the other, but it is necessary to first have a complete understanding of Takt Time, before attempting to grasp the system as a whole.

4 Calculation of Takt Time The first concept, Takt Time, is most frequently considered within the manufacturing environment. Takt Time, taken from the German word taktzeit, is a calculation that quantifies how quickly parts needs to be completed to meet customer demand. This calculation most often takes the form: Takt Time = Available Work Time / Rate of Customer Demand.

5 Takt Time, Broken Down To begin, consider what is meant by the first variable in the Takt Time formula. This is the Available Work Time in a given day. Example: if your office has one shift from 9AM to 5PM, the available time is eight hours. If you have two shifts, then the available time is 2x as much. The second variable in Takt Time, Rate of Customer Demand, is found by examining both past and present data surrounding customer demand requests.

6 Takt Times in an Office An office environment often has varying rates of customer demand. The smartest way to utilize Takt Time in the office is to use multiple, individual Takt Times. Using this sort of system, there will often be as many different Takt Times as there are differing customer demands. You can think of multiple Takt Times as individual delivery times for the unique demands of the customer.

7 Evaluating Skillsets and Complexity Use this knowledge of individual Takt Time to begin evaluating where to best utilize personnel, given both individual skill sets and complexity of the activity. Being aware of these capabilities allows for the creation of multi-skilled, cross-functional team to best address customer demands and delivery times. The right combination of skill sets allows for all complexities within a customer's demand to be addressed.

8 Ex: Customer Demand Example: there are a number of different customers throughout the day whose demands need to be fulfilled. In a non-lean work environment, the goal might be to try to fulfill all the demand, one customer at a time, just before the end of the working day. The typical strategy is to allocate all available resources to fulfill that demand.

9 Ex: Customer Demand, Cont. This is problematic for a number of reasons: 1. If demand fails to be met, then a backlog begins to accumulate, and it becomes increasingly difficult to meet customer demand because you are delivering all demands at one time. 2. Simply throwing more resources at the problem, you are neglecting one of the most important assets within a workplace: an individual's creative capacity.

10 Consider Your Strategy, Cont. Consider how a Lean strategy approaches this same issue of customer demand. People are broken into cross-functional teams based on individual skill sets. Each team is drafted to be best suited for each customer's specific demand requirements, Takt Times, and complexities. Takt Time is met in intervals based on the delivery time of each request from the customer.

11 Consider Your Strategy, Cont. As one set of processes is finished, a portion of that request s demand is fulfilled. This means that in any given day, different teams will be fulfilling demand at different rates. Instead of focusing on fulfilling a batch of customer demand, these teams can now flexibly work together to figure out where best to allocate resources and time, so that everybody meets their desired delivery times throughout the day.

12 Ex: Production Studio, Pt. 1 A real world example of this might be a production studio, working to complete a number of scripts in a given day. For this example, consider that there are three teams, each one writing on one of three different subjects: agriculture in the Pacific Northwest, the Irish Potato Famine, and Pre-16th Century Literature.

13 Ex: Production Studio, Pt. 2 The teams writing on these subjects are assembled based on familiarity with these subjects. After some time, the team working on agriculture in the Pacific Northwest is ahead of their Takt Time, and has established that they can maintain their Takt Time with one less person on the team. This person is now freed up to help on another one of the subjects, in this case, the Irish Potato Famine. The team responsible for articles concerning the famine isn t meeting their Takt Time, so they welcome the help.

14 Ex: Production Studio, Pt. 3 As the new team member already has familiarity with agriculture, they are easily brought up to speed. As each team meets or is ahead of their given Takt Time, a flexibility exists to assist other teams

15 Establishing Balance Establishing balance through education allows for more efficient and ultimately, more effective process completion. Instead of underutilizing an individual's potential talents, people are placed exactly within their capabilities. Without knowledge of product specific Takt Time, it is difficult to create cross-functional teams of people that are capable of meeting demand. Takt Time is a tool to establish which teams and processes are necessary to address the complexity driven by customer demands.