Use of Takt Time in Apparel Industry

Takt time is the allowable times to produce one product at the rate of customers’ demand. This is NOT the same as cycle time, which is the normal time to complete an operation on a product (which should be less than or equal to TAKT time).

Takt time is the calculated pace of production based on the average speed at which the customer is buying a product or service. The formula is net available time to produce per time period divided by customer demand per time period. For example when,

Net available time = 4500 minutes per shift (10 operators total man-minutes)
             Customer demand = 500 pieces per shift
             Takt time = (4500÷500) = 9 minutes per piece

Important things to be noted that,
Takt time can’t be measured with a stopwatch.
Takt time is not the time it takes to perform a task.
Takt time is only reduced or increased by changes in the production demand or net available time to work.

How Takt is used to in Garment Production?

As the definition says, it is the demand of customer or simply demand of following processes. To set a production assembly line takt time is taken as a base to determine work content to be given to each operator in the line.

Takt time is a very important tool for Lean Line or One Piece Flow Production.
For example, demand from the production line is 60 pieces per hour. In one hour you had only 3600 seconds. So takt time for the line will be 60 seconds/pieces (3600 seconds/60 pieces). So, you know that your target of production. According to this target and garment work content (suppose men’s full sleeve shirt) you have to determine how many operators should be taken to set the line. Let’s assume SAM of the shirt is 20 minutes or 1200 seconds. In one minute each operator has only 60 seconds. So to produce a piece in 60 seconds, the total number of operators required 1200/60 = 20 Nos. (Consider that each operator works at 100% efficiency.)

You have to distribute all operations within 20 operators. All operations will have different work content. So to equalise work content each operator will get work of about 60 seconds of work content. For this, few operators will do multiple operations with low work content.