See what I did there? Just my little Lean Sigma joke there…
From an operations perspective, any business needs to understand the most effective and efficient use of resources. It is not something that most businesses put a lot of thought into. Typically, provided you have enough people when and where you need them, and customers aren’t tapping their feet and looking at their watches, success right?
What is more likely is that you probably are throwing away money and time. I can say that confidently because basically everyone does!
Takt time is the estimate for how long you should spend doing a task to meet the demand across the whole day. So, if you have 80 customers in a day, that’s 10 you need to see each hour (assuming an 8h day without loo breaks or lunch…) so you can spend 6 minutes with each customer if you do it yourself. If you work with someone, then you can take 12 minutes (or 10 to allow for those loo breaks….but that is a different lean sigma project!).
This is really simple when you break it down and explain things this way (rather than the original German…). It also doesn’t reflect the reality of fast and slow transactions, customers who need to talk or explain at length what they need, or even those curly problems that you’ve never come across before.
To do that, you need the help of someone who has done this stuff before and can work with you. In simple English, and who is willing to teach you how. There are ways to manage this that free your time, make more effective use of time and skills while making customers (and the Finance Manager) happy.
Whether manufacturing, administration, R&D, IT, or banking, I’ve worked with businesses and reduced the stress of meeting customer demand and seen the benefits in each industry. These principles work, and they work anywhere.
You just need to use takt in your approach!
