Cycle Time – the key metric?

A teacher friend recently described a reporting process that she has to regularly go through for each child she works with. She was frustrated at the lack of communication between the different parts of the education system, which leads to her completing different forms with the same information again and again. It seems absurd and shouldn’t happen, but this repetition of tasks is an all to common complaint in organisations across the country. In Performance Measurement, we call this ‘Waste’.

Waste can be measured in different ways, using different metrics, but there is one measurement that can be used as a high level indicator of waste throughout a process, and it’s probably the most common metric used to assess performance for improvement projects. Cycle Time is the total time from the beginning to the end of the process being targeted by the improvement project, including total process time and all delays.

Why is Cycle Time a useful metric?

The time it takes to deliver your product or service is a surprisingly useful thing to measure. It is not just about meeting the time commitments you make to your customers, it’s about understanding what factors add up to make the Cycle Time the length it is.

It’s in this process that organisations usually discover dead time between stages of the process, waste and rework, and even things that didn’t need to be done at all.

Waste is the one category of performance that is important to every organisation and business in every sector. Cycle Time can be one of the easiest ways to highlight where waste is building.

How Cycle Time highlights Waste
Waste is commonly categorised into four forms:

  • waiting (queues etc.)
  • excess (scrap, inventory, tasks done to a higher standard than required)
  • rework (tasks that need to be done again, errors that need correcting)
  • redundancy (tasks that didn’t need to be done at all)

Cycle Time can be used as a measure for all four forms of waste. Working to reduce the cycle time forces you to find and address where the different types of waste are in your process, and can keep your team focused on the overall project by giving them one, universal metric.

Defining Cycle Time

I have found, however, that in performance measurement projects, people don’t always agree on what Cycle Time is! It is key to any improvement project’s success that everyone has the same understanding of the measures. PuMP® is a great methodology to use throughout your projects as it encourages teams to define their measures together so that everyone has a good understanding of what they are measuring and why.

I define Cycle Time as the time it takes from a customer (internal or external) declaring a need for something, to the time when they have that need fulfilled. Reducing Cycle Time can be a great universal driver of waste reduction in any business or organisation. If you’d like to find out more about defining cycle time and other measures using the PuMP® methodology, please get in touch.

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