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With pull, people were working more constantly and idle time went down. But one station (e.g. station 5) still took longer than the others—it was the bottleneck. The pull system helped avoid huge build-ups, but that station still set the pace. The rest of the line was sometimes waiting on it, and we weren't getting a steady rhythm.
Takt is the rhythm of customer demand—the rate we need to produce to match the market. If one station is much slower than the others, it dictates the whole line and creates uneven load. We balance to takt: we split the long cycle at the bottleneck into two stations (so the same work is done by two people in parallel, each with a shorter cycle) and we merge later stations that have shorter cycle times so one person can do them. Same number of people overall—we're not cutting jobs—but the flow is more even. The change: takt stations—split the bottleneck (e.g. station 5 → 5a and 5b) and merge later stations where cycle time allows. Same headcount, more even flow, and we get closer to a steady takt that matches demand.
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