Takt Time, Cycle Time, Throughput time,Lead Time – The difference

Confused of these four times, Lead time, Throughput time, Takt time and Cycle time? Don’t worry you are in the right place. Before leaving this page you will be able to understand the difference between these times, crisp and clear. Lets start with an example…

Situation

To a restaurant a customer came. He entered in to the the restaurant. Like this customer usually, 40 customers comes to this restaurant per hour. He went to the washroom for washing his hand. After washing his hand he came to his chair and sat comfortably. At the moment when he sat on his chair a waiter came to him with a small book and pen for taking order. He ordered four Chapati and Chicken curry.

After getting the order the waiter entered the details in his book and went to the kitchen for giving the order details to the chef who makes the dishes. After communicating this to the kitchen now the waiter is free until the food is ready to deliver to the customer. During this time the waiter can go and take another order or he can do other duties assigned to him.

After getting the order chef went to store for taking the wheat powder and moved the wheat powder to the mixing area and mixed the powder. But one chef was mixing for another chapati, hence he has to wait for 2 minutes. It took 5 minutes for mixing. After mixing the chef moved it to the rolling section where it gets the shape. It took 5 minutes for rolling 4 chapattis. Then he took the chapati to the cooking section. It took 6 minutes for cooking 4 chapati. After cooking the chef transferred the cooked 4 chapati to the dispatch area.

Then he started to cook chicken curry. What he was done is, he moved to the section where chicken pieces were stored and took them. Then he moved to the washing section. And it took 3 minutes for washing. Then he moved to cooking area, where he prepared the chicken curry by mixing various ingredients in correct proportion. It takes 20 minutes for cooking the chicken curry. Then he moved the chicken curry to the dispatch area.

The person in the dispatch area informed the waiter that the dish is ready. Waiter came to the dispatch area and took the food and went back to the customer for delivering the food. After delivering the food the waiter moved back from the customer and involved in some other duties assigned to him. The customer ate the 4 chapati and chicken curry very well and informed the waiter to bring the bill. The waiter moved to the billing station entered the details of the food and printed the bill and gave to customer. The customer puts the cash in the folder and gave to the waiter. He went to the cashier, gave bill and money to him. The cashier gave bill and balance amount to the waiter and the waiter returned it to the customer. Customer takes the bill and balance amount and gave some tip to the waiter and said good bye and went away from the restaurant.

This is the situation and hopes all is well understood with this situation. If not please read once again otherwise you will not understand the rest.

Lead time is the time between the moment customer sat on his chair and the moment the customer says good bye. Or in other words it is the time between order placement by the customer and reception of payment from the customer. Siting on the chair is the indication of the customer want something, hence we started the lead time from this point. If we omit this element, the time between the customer sits on the chair and up to order placement will not be accounted and it will not be taken for analysis for further improvement. As we all know, purpose recording something is to improve it, this is the case here, after the lead time calculation, this lead time should be analysed and should be reduced as much as possible. This reduction in the lead time will lead to customer satisfaction.

Cycle time is the time between the moment an operation starts and ends. Hope you all know what is operation. Operation is an activity done on an item to make it closer to the desired output, by a single machine or operator. Also series of operations are called a process. Examples of operation and its cycle time in our example are, Chapati mixing = 3 minutes, Chapati rolling = 2 minutes, Chapati cooking = 5 minutes, Chicken pieces cleaning = 2 minutes and Chicken curry cooking = 20 minutes.

Throughput time is the time between the moment the chef got the information to make the dishes and the moment the dishes are taken by waiter from dispatch area. That means its total time taken for movement of the raw material and information for producing one product. Throughput time includes all elements such as process time, inspection time, waiting time and material and information movement time, within the production process. Please note that the throughput time is measured between the start of the production and product dispatch. The elements happening before the start of the production and the elements happening after dispatch is not accounted in the throughput time, which is the main difference with lead time. Please keep this in mind. Normally the total time raw material waited in the warehouse waiting for the production also to be added to throughput time.

Takt time is the maximum time within which all operations in the restaurant should be completed so as to meet their customer demand. In this case the takt time is 60/40 = 1.5 minutes. Takt time calculated by the formula available production time / demand during that period. This is the basics of lean manufacturing and this time can be considered as a target for improvement.

Ok I have done here. I know, after reading this there will be a lot of doubts in your mind. That’s good!!! It means you have understood the concept of these four times and that is the purpose of this post. Yes, this restaurant will not be able to meet its customer demand as what you are thinking. This restaurant needs a tons of improvement for meeting customer demand. That leads to an another topic time reduction. That I will explain later. Enough for now. Thank You.

But one more thing, improvement of this restaurant I leave it to you. Please comment to this post on how we can improve this situation. How can we leave this restaurant like this?, since we have spend so much time on this.

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