Every operation has a heartbeat.Let’s measure yours.
Six questions about your company, about five minutes. At the end, you will know the rhythm your customer sets, how much of the time your work sits still and how much is waiting inside right now.
The math runs in your browser. Nothing is sent or stored.
What does your operation deliver to the customer?
Pick the unit that best represents one delivery. That is what we will follow from request to finish.
How many items do your customers ask for each month?
Demand, not capacity: what comes in, not what you can make. An average of the last few months is enough.
How much time a day does the operation work?
The workday of the people doing the work, minus breaks. If there is more than one shift, say how many.
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Every —, a customer asks for a item. That is your operation’s takt: the beat that demand sets.
Takt is German for beat: the conductor’s baton. The math is simple: available time ÷ demand. — a day ÷ — items a day.
Takt is not how much you can produce. It is how much the customer asks for. You do not pick it and you do not tighten it: it only changes when demand or available time changes.
The whole company should beat to it: sales, operations, purchasing, finance. Whoever runs slower becomes a queue. Whoever runs faster makes what nobody has asked for yet.
From request to delivery, how many working days does a item take?
The time the customer feels: from the moment they ask until they receive it. An average will do.
And how much real work does a item take?
Picture one person doing a item from start to finish, adding up every step, with no queue, waiting or interruption. How many minutes would it be?
— of the time, the item is sitting still.
Your customer waits — for something that takes — of work.
Items inside your operation right now, on average. Each one is cash sitting still, a customer waiting and, almost always, a hidden problem.
Waiting does not live in anyone. It lives between people: in the queue for the next step, in the approval, in the batch waiting to fill. That is why no productivity report shows it.
Little’s Law: work in process = demand × lead time. — a day × — = —. Shorten the lead time and that inventory shrinks with it.
In operations that have never been mapped, value-adding work commonly sits below 5% of the lead time. The good news: the gain is in the waiting, and it does not require anyone to work faster.
How many people work directly in this flow?
Everyone who touches the item at some step, from request to delivery. Add up fractions: two people at half time count as one.
— people do the work at the pace of takt.
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The whole company on the same beat
Every area has its own rhythm. When one of them works in batches, saving up to do it all at once, the queue forms at its door, even if everyone is busy.
Does any area in your company work like this? Approves once a day, buys once a week, invoices once a month?
Now you see the rhythm. Next, see the flow.
Where the waiting is. Which step is the bottleneck, which queue grows, which area runs off the beat, and what that costs each month. These numbers show the size of the problem. The map shows where it is.
In the diagnostic, we map your operation’s value stream in a web tool, with real data from each step. In two weeks, you see the whole flow and where to strike first.
The button opens WhatsApp with your numbers already written. You decide whether to send.