We’ve spoken about Lean Manufacturing many times on our blog, and it’s a term that most people are familiar with. There are many different ways that lean manufacturing can be implemented in a business; Takt Time is one of the fundamental aspects of it.

But what exactly is Takt Time?

It can be used in all areas of business, but is more relevant in manufacturing – specifically in production lines. The basic definition of Takt Time is the maximum amount of time allowed per unit for production in order to meet customer demand. So, if there is a lot of demand for the unit, then your maximum allowed time to make the unit is very small, however, if there is not a lot of demand for the unit, the maximum allowed time to make it is a lot larger.

To discover exactly what your Takt Time is, you would need to figure out the amount of time in total that you have to work on your order – remembering to take into account employee breaks, lunches, machine downtime, etc. – and divide it by how many units you need to produce (again taking into account the fact that there may be test parts and defective units).

So how does Takt Time help you implement lean manufacturing? Simply, once you have Takt Time in place, you can look at your process and see what is inefficient and non-value-added, and decide from there what can be improved upon. Ways that this can be done include reducing idle time, set-up time and eliminating waste. One of the biggest benefits of Takt Time is that you will easily be able to see where any bottlenecks are in the production process and can quickly fix that.

We’ve spoken a bit about continuous improvement on our blog, but we haven’t yet talked about WHY exactly it is important for manufacturers, and how exactly you can apply it to your business.

As a brief reminder, continuous improvement is the process of constantly making your business run more efficiently, with better effectiveness and producing better quality. On the most basic level, it is a series of small changes to improve your business, with the belief that building on all of these small changes will make a great bettering of your business. It is perhaps best stated by Edward Deming, as “the need to improve constantly and forever the system of production and service to improve quality and productivity and thus constantly decrease costs.”

This process is important for manufacturers, especially in our economic time, because it can help us to cut costs, to produce higher quality products at a faster rate, to reduce the amount of waste and deficient products we produce, and to remain competitive with other companies (both on a national and global stage).

Sounds like a great thing, doesn’t it? And there are many different ways in which you can apply continuous improvement in manufacturing, some of which are very successful and have become very popular. These include Kaizen, Just-in-Time and Lean manufacturing.

How are you applying continuous improvement in your business?

Continuous improvement in manufacturing is vital to help our businesses continue to grow and stay competitive in the global market. Have you thought about implementing changes to make your manufacturing process more lean? Are you working towards improving the quality of the product you manufacture? What about reducing a negative impact you may have on our environment? While these are great projects to implement, sometimes we don’t always have the funds available to actually do so.

That’s where the CME SMART Funding Program comes in.

The Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters group (CME) created the CME SMART Program with funding provided by the government of Ontario. This program was created to help small to medium sized manufacturers in Ontario improve efficiency and productivity to better compete in the global market.

How do they do this? They help fund projects that implement changes to improve your operational efficiency. These projects could include lean manufacturing and/or design, environmental impact reduction, IT best practices, quality improvement and energy efficiency. These projects should hopefully not just increase your efficiency but would change the way you do business, as well as reduce or eliminate waste (both wasted time and wasted materials) and phase out mistakes and non-value-added activities.

After getting approval from CME for the funding, these projects must be started within 2 months of your notification of selection from the CME, and should not take longer than 6 months to implement.

How much do they fund? The best projects proposed to the CME SMART Program get selected for funding, and you can receive either 50% of your project costs, or $50,000 – whichever is less.

Who is eligible? Companies with 10-500 employees that have their manufacturing operations in Ontario are eligible for the CME SMART Program. These companies would have to have been in operation in Ontario for at least two years.

Northbridge Consultants is a service provider for the CME SMART Program. We can provide you with SMART Assessments and help you implement these programs.