Takt time vs cycle time vs lead time — the 3-minute guide
Takt, cycle, and lead time get confused constantly. They measure different things and drive different decisions. Here's the clean version.
Takt time — the customer's pace
Takt = available working time ÷ customer demand. If you have 28,800 seconds of working time per day and the customer needs 480 units, takt is 60 seconds per unit. Takt is what the process MUST hit to meet demand. It's set by the customer, not the operator.
Cycle time — what the process actually does
Cycle time is how long it actually takes to produce one unit at a given step. Measured with a stopwatch at the Gemba, not from a system report. If cycle time > takt, that step is your bottleneck. You can't exceed takt no matter how hard you try downstream.
Lead time — what the customer experiences
Lead time is door-to-door: from when an order enters to when the customer receives it. Usually dominated by wait time (queues, batching, approvals) — not cycle time. Little's Law: more WIP = more lead time, for the same cycle time.
Putting them together
Step one: measure takt (customer demand). Step two: measure cycle time per step (Gemba stopwatch). Step three: map lead time end-to-end (VSM). The bottleneck is the step where cycle time approaches or exceeds takt. The biggest improvement lever is the longest wait time between steps.