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The primary benefit of understanding the cycle times of your product or service is to determine if you can provide them in a timely manner that meets your customer’s needs. The real value is knowing what to do with your cycle time information. The formulas are straightforward and easy. Afterwards, the toasters are placed in a heating chamber to quick-dry the paint.įrom the beginning of the painting to the completion of the paint drying in the chamber takes 40 minutes, but the cycle time is not 40 minutes since multiple products were worked simultaneously.ĭivide the total parts produced, four, into the production run time, 40, to arrive at an actual cycle time of 10 minutes per part. The toasters are painted by an automatic robot arm that paints four toasters at a time in a wave movement. Say you’re working on understanding the cycle time for painting the toasters from the earlier example. If dealing with batches of items, instead of one piece flow, simply take the total parts produced and divide that quantity by the production run time to determine the cycle time per part.Ĭycle Time = (Finish Time – Start Time) / Units Produced Subtract the time the first task was started from the time at the end of the last task.Ĭycle Time for single piece flow item = Finish Time – Start Timeįor example, if the first step of building a toaster starts at 8:30 a.m., and the completed toaster is packaged and ready to ship at 11:30 a.m., the total cycle time for producing the toaster is three hours.Ĭycle time can also be used for specific portions of the total process, having one cycle time for assembly, a separate cycle time for test, and a final one for packaging. The mathematical formula behind cycle time is not difficult to understand. To make things regarding a simply concept even more confusing, people often mistake other time concepts, such as lead time or takt time, for cycle time. The key word in the definition is actual, as many companies will use cycle time to describe the expected time spent working on producing the item, and these two times are often not the same. Cycle time includes both value-added time as well as non-value-added time. An overview: What is cycle time?Ĭycle time is the actual time spent working on producing an item or providing a service, measured from the start of the first task to the end of the last task. Will it? Do your company’s processes make it possible to be on time per the customer’s needs? Tto know that requires understanding how long it takes to produce the product, and that requires knowing your cycle times. The customer just called again, wondering if the item they ordered will be on time. Definition of Cycle Time: « Back to Glossary Index