Often referred to as the heartbeat of a Beverage Can Making Machine production line, takt time is the rate at which products or services should be produced to meet the rate of customer demand. Accurately measuring takt time is essential to ensuring that production targets and customer expectations are met.
Takt time = Available minutes for production/required units of production
Having an accurate measure of takt time and sharing this information on the factory floor means that every member of the team knows what success looks like for each unit of production. Ensuring that your employees have this information means that they are equipped with the information they need to quickly identify if something is threatening the required level of output on the assembly line. The quicker problems are spotted, the faster they can be resolved.
Meat on a SEALPAC production line
Carefully monitoring takt time can be the difference between hitting targets and experiencing machine downtime. Typically, downtime refers to any unplanned stop that is 5 minutes or longer. This can occur if a piece of equipment fails or breaks down.
Downtime can have a huge impact on the efficiency of your production line affecting targets, productivity and profitability so it’s vital to get this right. Although downtime can be product dependent and vary significantly between different industries, it’s important to know what downtime means for your business and what level to aim for if you are going to look at increasing line efficiency.
In a factory where there is a single dry food being fed through a production line and there’s no need to factor in time for a product switch/changeover or resetting a machine, a good efficiency rate might be anywhere between 90% up to 99%. In contrast, if lots of different complex foods (e.g. meat with different wet sauces) are being fed through a production line and changes need to regularly be made to the set-up, an efficiency rate of 70% might be very reasonable.
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