[Roy Whitaker]

takt is the pace of production that it takes to meet the customer’s demand.  It can be calculated by identifying the total amount of time available divided by the customer demand.  The total time available is calculated by the number of hours of an employee minus breaks, lunch, set up time, briefings etc.  The customer demand is given to you by your customer. 
Cycle time is the time that it takes to produce one complete unit in seconds.  We use cycle time divided by takt time to indicate how many employees are needed to complete the task.
Our setup is not a normal factory floor.  I am looking for a productivity board that shows the current rate and whether it is meeting the demand.  If not we can then move our resources around or identify the problem within the production line and correct.

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[Roy Whitaker]

All,
Many thanks for your attempts at humor, but much to your dismay I fully understand takt time and cycle time.  We currently rely on a manual method of capturing this and it is far too easy for them to manipulate this data.  What we are searching for is a productivity board that will measure their efficiency, target, and current rate of our operators.  Now if this is seen as a motivational tool then absolutely I need to motivate my people to ensure that they are working at the efficiency that is needed therefore I do not need to employ more people than what is needed.  As a leader I need to be able to see this information and ensure that our production line is operating correctly therefore allowing my team to become proactive and address issues rather than reactive and address the same issues but way too late in the process. 

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[Roy Whitaker]

We are producing soda and beverage drawers.  We have used the manual process that you describe but that leads to the ability to pencil whip the outcome.  We have some triggers in place to determine if we are on time or not but we have so much WIP in play that it really does not become a problem until we reduce the WIP which is what I am doing.  We are looking for a visual management system that will update and calculate without any kind of manual input of data. 
Our automation is nil with a limited budget of around 1,000 or less, preferably less given the current economic environment.  The inspection process we currently utilize is when we retrieve the completed beverage drawer and we have visuals in place identifying the correct specification.  They examine the drawer prior to placing it in the carts.

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