Takt Planning As Trains & Cars & Trucks

Trains and Freeways (Two Ways to Understand Takt Planning)

Hey everybody, welcome out to another blog. We’re going to be talking about trains and then freeways, and it’s a new insight with Takt that I think everybody would absolutely love. If you’re interested in that, please stay with us.

Welcome everybody, I hope you’re doing well and staying safe out there. I’m really excited to be with you again. We’re still driving home to Phoenix from Atlanta, Georgia from doing the Super PM boot camps. Let’s get into the topic today. I was doing this with a really neat company in Atlanta, and I had some insights.

Let me give you two insights about Takt planning that will help you understand it better.

Insight One: The Takt Governor (Standard Space Unit and Standard Time Unit)

Sometimes people, when they adjust their zones and their Takt time, sometimes on the calculator, the overall duration of the phase will increase as you get smaller zone sizes, and then once it sets back down to like a two-day Takt time or one-day Takt time, it will go back down again, so it ranges. I had this insight from Kevin, and it hit me that there’s two things in Takt which act like a governor.

You know what I’m talking about? A governor on a bicycle or a motorcycle or something like that is something that limits your speed, it limits your accelerator, and the governor on my ATVs that my dad had, it would prevent me from going full throttle, or you’ll see them on golf carts, you’ll see them on side-by-sides. It basically limits the amount that you’re able to accelerate. It’s a governor.

And I realized that in Takt, the governor for the speed of the train of trades is set by your standard space unit and your standard time unit. Let me say that again: standard space unit is the smallest divisible area within your zones, but it’s really in the phase. You can’t divide any less than that. It’s your standard space unit, and it also becomes like a flat or a room or a unit in multifamily, or like an office in a medical office building. That’s your standard space here. It can’t be any less than that.

And your standard time unit is your minimum time unit inside the Takt system, and in the United States, we use a day typically for commercial construction because everything—daily huddles, cycles, crew starts—everything is organized into a day. In civil work, I often go down to 10-minute Takt times. In shipbuilding, they’re in 10-20-minute Takt times. In really advanced Takt practitioners, they’ll be doing it hour by hour, but for the most part in commercial construction, we use a day, and that means the smallest divisible time unit for what our system culture and region will allow currently is a day.

Now, one of these days, I hope that that changes, but the bottom line is your standard space unit and your standard time unit are both like speed governors, like just like on the go-karts or the golf carts that limit how fast you’re able to accelerate. You can’t really go any faster than that. You can keep going faster if your zone sizes could be cut down in lower segments in the standard space unit and if your Takt time was less than a day, meaning if it was into the hours.

Here’s how I’ll explain it. Let’s say that you have seven wagons that all take five days, and then you split that into two zones, you’re on a four-day Takt time, three zones and you’re on a three-day Takt time, and then four zones on a two-day Takt time, then five zones on a two-day Takt time, but then when you go to six, seven, eight, and nine zones, it increases, and that’s because the Takt time divisions would go from five, four, three, two to 1.8, 1.6, 1.4, 1.2, then back to one. Then it would reset down to actually a faster speed, so it’s actually because of rounding to a day.

Like, typically, a commercial construction project is not going to have a 1.80 day Takt time. It’s going to round up to two, so that’s why those scenarios might get a little bit longer, and that’s where you get your trade time gained, actually. That was a really neat insight. Your train of trades will never go faster than your standard space unit and your standard time unit will allow. They’re like governors. That was an interesting revelation.

Insight Two: Trains Versus Freeways (Single-Train Versus Multi-Train Takt Planning)

The other revelation was that there’s, and this is something people trip up on all the time, is like, “Yeah, I love Takt. I love being on a rhythm, but it’s very hard to take different tasks and activities and package them all into even flowing wagons,” which I agree with. And they’re like, “Yeah, this just doesn’t seem practical.” But there’s single-train Takt planning and multi-train Takt planning.

And if I had been thinking all of these years, I could have called it train and tracks Takt planning and car and freeway Takt planning. And this is the analogy. If you really look into almost every single thing that we talk about in Takt is analogous, at least for when you’re doing wagon-based, ties perfectly into a train analogy. It works almost exactly like a rail line.

Even I used to be like, “Well, how did the materials get into the wagons?” Well, the train actually goes from the station to the depot, station, depot, station, depot. That’s when you go to your lay down, back to your zone, lay down, back to your zone, lay down, back to your zone. That’s where they pick up the material. So I actually got my brain wrapped around it. The analogy is almost exactly like a rail line. And you can understand Takt planning by understanding trains. And you literally package them into a boxcar or wagon on a train.

But there are some Takt planning practitioners and influencers that will say that’s the only way to do it. And that’s just absolutely false. 90%, at least in the United States, of Takt plans, and actually, I’ve seen this in Japan, which is a bit of name dropping for me. In fact, I was talking to Niklas Modig, and he’s like, “You don’t need any more validation than to know that they do it that way in Japan.” But most of Takt plans are task based.

And there’s some flexibility there. You’ll only have one phase per set of zones, but you can have multiple trains flowing through there. But if I had been thinking all of these years, I would have used the car and freeway analogy. And I’m driving home. So, it really hit me. We’re driving on a freeway. The freeway is planned. It’s leveled out. It’s cleared. They’re trying their best to keep it clear from roadblocks.

But I’m going a different speed than the big rigs. And it would be insane to have us all go the same speed. Because if you pace me at the pace of the big rigs going 55, 65 miles an hour, some of them are going faster, then it would take me a lot longer to get home. And I want to get home and see my family. We all go at different speeds, but we coordinate so we don’t hit each other.

So, there’s passing, there’s intersections, there’s sometimes where we’re dependent. There’s courtesy. You know, if I’m going to get around a truck and they want to tell me it’s safe to pull in front of them, they flash their lights. I click my blinkers. There are ways to do this, but we’re all on one road, but we’re different individual vehicles going different speeds or i.e. Takt time. And it works because we’re coordinated with a system of rules.

A train takes that all out of the equation. A train just says, “Hey, whether you’re big or small, get on the wagons. And we’re all going the same speed, the same distance apart.” And both scenarios have their place, quite frankly.

The Two Analogies for Takt Planning

Here’s how the two analogies work:

• Train and tracks Takt planning (single-train, wagon-based, time-based) – The German way of doing Takt planning is wagon-based, strictly in the analogy of trains and train tracks. You package tasks into wagons. All wagons go the same speed. Same distance apart. It’s rigid. It’s disciplined. It works like a rail line.
• Car and freeway Takt planning (multi-train, task-based, resource-based) – The flexible way is like cars and trucks on a freeway. The freeway is planned, leveled, cleared. The speed limits are set to the baseline bottlenecks—you design the roadways to accommodate the slowest vehicles, which are the trucks. But you allow the cars to go faster up within a certain range. You have a pace-setting train of trades in the phase, and then you let other trades have their own Takt time and go faster within reason, within a certain limit, just like a freeway.

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Why Multi-Train Works (The Freeway Explanation)

The Germans often are like, “Well, if you do multi-train Takt planning, how can you do the calculator?” And it’s like you do the calculator based on your pace-setting train of trades in a phase. And that becomes the overall parameters and the scope of the phase. And then everything else fits around it. So it’s just like a freeway. The roads are designed for trucks to go 55 to 75 miles per hour. And that is the baseline speed. And the width and everything is based around the largest, slowest vehicles. And then the faster vehicles are allowed to go faster within a certain range.

Same thing with the car truck road Takt planning or multi-train Takt planning or task-based Takt planning or resource-based Takt planning is that you have a pace-setting train of trades in the phase and then you let other trades have their own Takt time and go faster within reason, within a certain limit, just like a freeway. And it works very, very, very well.

Takt planning isn’t about fitting everything into a Takt. Takt means rhythm. It’s an older word for rhythm in German. And it means can trades work from zone to zone to zone to zone in a flow in a highly coordinated system. And you can do that outside of the original train train track analogy.

A Challenge for Takt Planners

Here’s what I want you to do this week. Understand the two governors: standard space unit and standard time unit. Your train of trades will never go faster than those will allow. And understand the two analogies: train and tracks for single-train wagon-based Takt planning, and car and freeway for multi-train task-based Takt planning. Both have their place. Both work. Choose the right one for your project. As we say at Elevate, Takt governors are standard space unit and standard time unit that limit train speed. Single-train is like trains. Multi-train is like cars on freeways. That’s how Takt planning works.

On we go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Takt governors?

Standard space unit (smallest divisible area in the phase) and standard time unit (minimum time unit, typically a day in commercial construction). Your train of trades will never go faster than these governors allow. They’re like speed limiters.

Why does duration increase when you add more zones sometimes?

Because Takt time divisions go from 5, 4, 3, 2 to 1.8, 1.6, 1.4, 1.2 days. But you can’t have a 1.8-day Takt time, so you round up to 2. That’s why duration increases until you reset to 1-day Takt time.

What’s the difference between train and freeway Takt planning?

Train (single-train, wagon-based): All trades go same speed, same distance apart. Freeway (multi-train, task-based): Pace-setting train sets baseline, other trades go faster within limits. Like trucks and cars on a freeway.

Which Takt planning method is more common?

Multi-train (freeway) task-based Takt planning is 90% of Takt plans in the United States and Japan. Single-train (train) wagon-based is the German way and is more rigid and disciplined.

How do you calculate multi-train Takt planning?

Do the calculator based on your pace-setting train of trades in the phase. That becomes the overall parameters. Everything else fits around it. Just like freeways are designed for trucks, then cars go faster.