Takt Time and Line Balance Calculator
Takt time from your shift pattern and customer demand, then a check of whether your stations can actually keep that pace. An average cycle time under takt is not the same as making takt. The line runs at the pace of its slowest station, and a station that averages just under takt will still miss it on every slow cycle.
Enter each station's average cycle time and, if you have it, the longest time you observed. The page flags stations that make takt on average but not every time.
Nothing you type here leaves your browser. Every calculation runs in this page. The page itself counts visits, like every page on this site, but never what you enter.
1. Your takt time
2. Can your line make takt?
One row per station or operator, in seconds per unit. The average comes from timing a run of cycles. The longest observed time is optional, and it is the more honest test: a station has to make takt on its slow cycles too, not just on average.
| Station | Average cycle, s | Longest observed, s | Against takt | Remove |
|---|
Cycle time by station, against takt
The arithmetic, with your numbers
Shown so you can check it, or redo it in a spreadsheet.
What this does not tell you
- An average under takt does not mean the station makes takt. If a station averages 95% of takt and its times vary by more than that 5% margin, it misses takt on a good share of cycles. Each miss either starves the next station or builds a queue in front of it. Time at least 20 or 30 cycles and record the spread, not only the mean.
- The minimum number of stations is a floor, not a staffing plan. It assumes the work can be cut into pieces of any size and shared out perfectly. Real tasks have fixed lengths, an order they must happen in, and tools that live at one station. Expect the real number to be the same or higher.
- Takt counts only planned breaks. Changeovers, breakdowns, waiting for material and quality holds all come out of the same available time. Many plants run to a planned cycle time somewhat faster than takt to leave room for them. This page does not guess that allowance for you.
- Balance efficiency says how evenly the work is shared, not how fast the line is. A line can be perfectly balanced and still too slow for demand. It can also be badly balanced and still make takt with room to spare. Read it next to the bottleneck figure, never alone.
- It assumes every station works on every unit. A product mix with different work content per model, rework loops, or stations shared between lines need a mixed-model calculation, which this page does not do.
- Demand per day is an average too. If orders swing from week to week, a takt time set on the average is wrong on most days. Decide whether you are setting the line for the average week or the busy one.
The rest of the Lean Six Sigma toolkit
- Control Chart Maker: I-MR, c and p Charts with Run Rules: I-MR, c and p charts with the four Western Electric run rules.
- Process Capability Calculator: Cp, Cpk, Pp, Ppk: Cpk with its confidence interval, a Cpk against Ppk drift check and a normality test.
- Sigma Level Calculator: DPMO, yield and how sure you can be: DPMO and sigma level with the 95% interval, and whether a kaizen really cut defects.
- OEE Calculator: Availability, Performance, Quality Losses: OEE with each loss in minutes, and the one fix worth most.