Prepress Takt Time

[rnavlyt2]

Good Morning,

We have recently embarked on our Lean Manufacturing journey and this is my very first post.
It is great to see we are not the only shop diving in head first!

I am looking for any comments/suggestions/best practice, as to keeping track of takt time within the CSR/Prepress areas. Press/Plates/bindery etc seem fairly straight forward with product being delivered from the tail end of a machine.

If anyone could suggest as to how to record/manage takt in CSR/Prepress it would greatly
be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Ron

[Michael Josefowicz]

I just put a post on my blog this morning about Lean. There are some links there, but the content is something that is often overlooked.

What lean does, above all else, is provide quick, flexible response to customer demand. But muddling that message are perverse accounting practices that discourage quick delivery well matched to customer usage.

Here's the link Print in the Communication Ecology

[mattf]

Good Morning,

We have recently embarked on our Lean Manufacturing journey and this is my very first post.
It is great to see we are not the only shop diving in head first!

I am looking for any comments/suggestions/best practice, as to keeping track of takt time within the CSR/Prepress areas. Press/Plates/bindery etc seem fairly straight forward with product being delivered from the tail end of a machine.

If anyone could suggest as to how to record/manage takt in CSR/Prepress it would greatly
be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Ron

Advice? I like to use functions!

As we know, or some of us know, Takt time = Net Time available to work / the total demand. So before you dive into this, you need to understand the data:

1) How many jobs a day do you get through prepress?
2) How long does it take on average to get a specific job through prepress?
3) How much time during the day do you have prepress working?

Best tool to use this:

Excel.

I'm serious. By creating a proper excel spreadsheet you can keep track of how long your prepress guys took to do every specific job, how many a day they did and so on. This will determine their takt time. You can even setup takt times for every specific step if you want to. With these numbers you can move to the next step, which is analyzing the data.

Depending on how many you have within your prepress department, you can create a work cell that can function within "work packages". An example is one package is pre-flighting, analyzing files and creation of proofs. Another package could be sending files to plate maker, creating plates and sending plates out to the press.

Let me just say up front you should always listen to your prepress guys. Always keep them within the discussion of what can be done better, as they need to do it themselves. By keeping them involved they understand that you care about what they are doing, how they function and so on. A level of trust comes into play, and implementation is a lot easier.

Granted, I've never experienced this, but that's just my plight in this section of the market :P

[David Dodd]

Ron,

Congratulations on embarking on your lean journey, and welcome to the forum.

I have to disagree a little with mattf's description of takt time. One "textbook" definition of takt time is the average rate at which production must operate in order to meet customer demand for a given period of time. As mattf says, the basic formula for takt time is available production time (for a given period of time) divided by customer demand (for the same period of time). To use a simple example, suppose that you are a widget company. To meet customer demand, you must produce and ship 10 widgets per day. Your production operation works 8 hours per day. On these facts, the takt time for your widgets is 48 minutes. In other words, you must produce one widget every 48 minutes in order to meet customer demand. The purpose of calculating takt time is to enable a company to match production with customer demand and avoid both underproduction and overproduction.

Takt time is a common lean tool, but it is not useful for many printing companies. Takt time works well in repetitive manufacturing operations where three conditions exist:

1. The company produces a defined set of products.
2. The demand for each type of product is relatively stable over a reasonable period of time.
3. For each type of product, the process cycle times are approximately the same every time that type of product is produced.

When these conditions don't exist, takt time becomes almost meaningless.

So, if your company is a fairly traditional commercial printing company, you should probably focus on some of the other basic lean tools, especially in the early stages of your lean journey.

[mattf]

Ron,

Congratulations on embarking on your lean journey, and welcome to the forum.

I have to disagree a little with mattf's description of takt time. One "textbook" definition of takt time is the average rate at which production must operate in order to meet customer demand for a given period of time. As mattf says, the basic formula for takt time is available production time (for a given period of time) divided by customer demand (for the same period of time). To use a simple example, suppose that you are a widget company. To meet customer demand, you must produce and ship 10 widgets per day. Your production operation works 8 hours per day. On these facts, the takt time for your widgets is 48 minutes. In other words, you must produce one widget every 48 minutes in order to meet customer demand. The purpose of calculating takt time is to enable a company to match production with customer demand and avoid both underproduction and overproduction.

Takt time is a common lean tool, but it is not useful for many printing companies. Takt time works well in repetitive manufacturing operations where three conditions exist:

1. The company produces a defined set of products.
2. The demand for each type of product is relatively stable over a reasonable period of time.
3. For each type of product, the process cycle times are approximately the same every time that type of product is produced.

When these conditions don't exist, takt time becomes almost meaningless.

So, if your company is a fairly traditional commercial printing company, you should probably focus on some of the other basic lean tools, especially in the early stages of your lean journey.

I gotta jump in again on David's assessment and disagree with some of his comments.

Your explanation that repetitive manufacturing operations can use takt time is correct. However, I still believe you can take those same tools and put it toward a printing company. As Ron described, this would be within the pre-press setting. Pre-press is the first step in production and one of the most important. Even though you are working in at times a "custom manufacturing" mindset, you can still use the tools of takt time to gather data and see how to improve on the system that is pre-press.

Yes, they are dealing with files that are created differently every time, but what they do with it can be measured. Specific steps such as pre-flighting, proofing, plating, ripping, receiving files, analyzing files manipulating files and so on can all be measured within a timeline.

1) They are creating a defined set of products. Proofs and Plates. Granted, the specific scope of the work needs to be determined, but you can get an idea what type of work a specific printing company can produce.

2) I'll give you number two, as the next job that goes down might be due in 2 seconds! (worked in pre-press before, its a nightmare at times) Granted, if you have a controlled schedule where its all predefined how long certain steps will take, you can analyze the efficiency of that.

3) "For each type of product, the process cycle times are approximately the same every time that type of product is produced." This is true but the model of this can still be used for figuring out an average of how long certain types of jobs can take. So an average business card job could take an average time to get through and an average brochure job can take a certain amount of time to get through. You could even break it down by sheet size if you wanted to instead of mico-managing every specific job that "can" go through.

And yes, the idea is to eliminate overproduction and underproduction. The same idea could be put through with over and under capacity of the production facility of a printing company.

[Michael Josefowicz]

I'm not familiar with the lean tools, but my two cents.

The trick is to know where to start, since marginal improvements are possible almost everywhere.

I would start with a face to face with the best salesperson and the best CSR in the outfit. Then spend an hour or so focusing on what is suboptimal for your customers. In most cases, it's going to turn out to be late estimates, phone calls not returned, or some other communication problem. Sometimes but less often it's going to be unbilled AA's or late delivery.

Then keep drilling down with sales and CSR asking WHY that happens. You'll probably have to go through about 4 or 5 levels of WHY, until you get to something that can be fixed in the production process. It usually has something to do with someone being too busy too something. Then focus on fixing that. Once you get buy in from sales and CSR's everything after that is much easier.I'm not familiar with the lean tools, but my two cents.

I would start with a face to face with the best salesperson and the best CSR in the outfit. Then spend an hour or so focusing on what is suboptimal for your customers. In most cases, it's going to turn out to be late estimates, phone calls not returned, or some other communication problem. Sometimes but less often it's going to be unbilled AA's or late delivery.

Then keep drilling down with sales and CSR asking WHY that happens. You'll probably have to go through about 4 or 5 levels of WHY, until you get to something that can be fixed in the production process. It usually has something to do with someone being too busy too something. Then focus on fixing that. Once you get buy in from sales and CSR's everything after that is much easier.

[rnavlyt2]

Thanks All,

I now know why our brains are spinning.
It seems my goal would be to create some sort of tracking list (Excel, paper etc.) and follow jobs through the prepress process. Once I have that I will know our available time/capacity. This will then allow me to gauge our over/under production more closely. The issue I have always encountered is the whole aspect of customer demand. Most of our jobs just appear out of the blue sky with a "This is Hot" message from the sales rep. The whole pull principle is blown out of the water when a job is hot.
I appreciate all the input and will definitely have more questions in the future.
Next week I am training three days on SMED.
Overall, I really like the whole Lean Principles and see many of the benefits, it is just very difficult trying to taylor them to the conventional "old school" print mindset.

Thanks Again,
Ron

[David Dodd]

Ron,

Glad you jumped back in the discussion. Us "lean-heads" could have easily taken the discussion far from your original question. As you proceed with your lean journey, I would strongly encourage you to keep one thing in mind. The vast majority of lean resources (books, seminars, training programs, etc.) focus on how lean is used by repetitive, "assembly-line" operations. There are far fewer resources that describe how lean can be implemented by custom manufacturing companies or "job shops." In addition, most of the "classic" lean tools and techniques were originally developed to improve repetitive manufacturing operations, and some of those tools will not be particularly useful or effective for many printing companies. Some of these "classic" lean tools will work very well in a printing company, some will have to be adapted to work well, and others are difficult to use in any form.

Good luck and please say involved in the forum.

[craiglpress]

One method of tracking takt time in the preproduction areas is to use your MIS software's shop floor data collection application.
As each person in the pre-production area (CSR, planner, estimator, purchasing, etc) receives the order they create a data collection entry. For example...

-- when the CSR starts the order, they create a data collection entry "Order received"

-- when the planner starts the plan, they create a data collection entry "Order in planning"

-- when pre-production is done with the order ad it's ready to go to prepress, they create a data collection entry "Order sent to prepress"

This method gives you a complete audit trail of every order, so you can start to measure the throughput of individual orders, types of orders, etc, while implementing lean.

This approach has worked well when implementing our Lean Printing Office solution:
Profectus Lean Printing Office Consulting Services Overview - Lean Manufacturing, Best Practices

Craig L Press
President, Profectus, Inc.
Profectus Printing Industry Business Consultants specializing in best practices, lean, and information technology

[David Dodd]

I don't mean to harp on a point unnecessarily, but I think it's important to clarify the meaning of a few terms. Takt time is a pacing mechanism. It is not intended to be a measure of the time spent performing a particular process or all of the processes required for a particular job. Takt time tells you the pace at which you must produce a particular product in order to meet customer demand. So, for example, if you must produce 16 widgets per day to meet customer demand and you have 8 hours of production time each day assigned to making those widgets, then your takt time for that product is 30 minutes. All this means is that, on average, you must produce one widget every 30 minutes in order to meet customer demand.

The time actually spent performing the activities that are required to produce a product is cycle time. Suppose, for example, that a particular job requires three prepress activities - preflighting, imposition, and plate imaging. If an operator spends 15 minutes preflighting this job, then the preflighting cycle time is 15 minutes. If imposition requires 10 minutes and plate imaging requires 15 minutes, then the total prepress cycle time for this job would be 40 minutes.

Throughput time is the total chronological time that it takes to move a product through the production process or through a portion of the process. Suppose, for example, that the job described in the previous paragraph was delivered to prepress at 9 am and that plates for the job were delivered to the pressroom at 12 noon. In that case, the prepress throughput time for the job would be three hours.

The main point I want to make is that takt time is not a measure of the actual time required to produce a product or perform a process. Takt time is the pace at which you must produce in order to meet customer demand.