Can Toyota, Cadillac, a bunch of rock musicians from New Jersey and a classical composer who lived in Austria two centuries ago have anything in common?

Yup, they can.

Toyota, Beethoven, and Bruce Springsteen with The E-Street Band all understand the care required in orchestrating what they do (I’ll get to the Cadillac part in a minute). Toyota uses takt time in coordinating the production of the Camry, and musicians have for centuries used variants of takt time to write down and coordinate the performance of their music. Learning how great music is made can give insights into how important timing is in the creation of other great products.

In music we need each component of the arrangement – each note at the right volume, tone, and voice and of the right duration, each percussive sound from the right instrument at the right volume and sound quality – to arrive at the right time. Without it the arrangement falls apart. Likewise, whether we are building cars or pizzas or aircraft, or designing iphones, skyscrapers, or medical devices, production timing — things related to takt time — is critical.

Takt time is usually defined as something like “the average time it takes create one unit of production.” As a practical matter, takt time has a larger and more complex meaning than that, a meaning I want to explore.

Unlike most tech words associated with Lean, takt is not Japanese, but German. Being German, it’s pronounced like “talked”. As with so many such words, there is no one good English translation. For our purposes the best English translation of takt might be along the lines of tempo, interval, rhythm or cycle.

But there is a better translation, a universal translation. That translation is in the language of music. And music tells a much fuller story of what takt time means in a Lean environment.

Any remotely conventional music has what is called, in English, the time signature. In German, it’s called the taktvorzeichnung or, roughly, rhythm mark. During each short section of music, called a measure, a certain number of beats will be produced. The time signature tells how many beats will be produced during that measure.

One example in which the beats of the taktvorzeichnung are easily heard is Bruce Springsteen’s frenetic 1980’s rocker, Cadillac Ranch.

Cadillac Ranch opens with Max Weinberg playing the snare drum, cymbals, and kick drum, laying down the beat: One-two-three-four-One-two-three-four. There are four beats per measure, and the beginning of each measure is marked by the One beat of the drum.

Musicians instantly recognize the time signature for Cadillac Ranch as 4/4, read “four-four time” in English. In German is it called “viervierteltakt”, roughly “four quarter rythm”. As you listen to Cadillac Ranch you may lose the -two-three-four drum part behind the other instruments, but the piano, keyboards, saxophone, and guitars obviously carry through that rhythm, and you can hear the One-beat of the drum throughout the entire song.

The 4/4 time signature is so common, and has been for so long, that if a time signature isn’t noted in the score, it is understood to be 4/4 time. There are other time signatures which are relatively common, but must be noted so the musicians know the rhythm used by the composer.

For example, the taktvorzeichnung for Beethoven’s Für Elise, at once familiar and hauntingly beautiful when well-performed, is 3/8, “three eight time” in English, “drieachteltakt” in German, meaning there will be three beats produced per measure.

The point is that, whether the music is centuries old or written yesterday, virtually all western music has a time signature, and all the instruments and singers play their parts keying off the beat and rhythm noted in the time signature.

In the same way, parts suppliers for the Camry produce parts by keying off the production rate of the finished car. Every measure of time on the production line — a measure set by production of a single car — requires the production of one windshield, of four tires, of six pistons, of 20 lug nuts, of one alternator, and so on. In a sense each of these items will have its own time signature, tires at four beats per measure, pistons at six beats per measure, lug nuts at 20 beats per measure, and so on. As in music production, if somebody’s count is off, the whole arrangement falls apart.

There are differences, of course, in how musicians use taktvorzeichnung and how Toyota uses takt time. There is no inventory in live music. Live music is a just-in-time production system. On the other hand, in most manufacturing operations it’s virtually impossible to run without some measure of inventory.

In fact, it would be really hard to not inventory lug nuts. If Toyota is building a Camry every ten minutes, I can’t imagine building a machine slow enough to produce lug nuts at only 20 beats per measure — 20 lug nuts in ten minutes, one lug nut every thirty seconds. In the opposite way, it would be very difficult to have a single machine fast enough to mold a tire at four beats per measure, or every 2.5 minutes. More machines would be required, with a combined production rate necessary to meet the the needs of Toyota.

What happens then, is that Lean suppliers do what they must — improve processes, hire people, and purchase machinery — to build inventory to a level as low as they can get away with. That minimum level is set by the takt time of the finished product, but raised high enough to allow for statistically measured variations in production rate and quality, so even when they have the predictable (because they measured them) quality or productivity variations, their inventory is high enough to meet the customer’s production rate. That’s not quite just-in-time production, but it’s close, and it keys off the takt time of the finished product.

So if you find that your average production time, your takt time, is too high, that the music is missing parts or playing too slowly to meet the demands of your customer, don’t do the American-manager thing. Don’t get mad and start looking for somebody to blame. Instead, do the Lean-manager thing: go find out why the lug nut player is only playing at 19 beats per measure, and help him get it up to 20 beats per measure. That’s the Toyota Way.

 

Copyright 2015 by Paul G. Spring. All rights reserved.