TACT
noun · from German Takt, the beat a conductor keepsOne interval of time in which every workstation completes its work, so the whole yard moves together.
TACT begins from the contract delivery date and works backwards to a single, visible beat. That beat is not handed down by the planning office. It is built up from the working teams’ own Detailed Work Procedures, which say how many workers a job takes and for how many days, and tuned against one another until block assembly, outfitting, painting, grand assembly, the dock and the quay keep the same time. Every support function is then set to it.
Builds upward from each activity, its duration and its precedences, into a network of tens of thousands of activities. It serves the planning office and tells the working team nothing it can act on.
Begins from the delivery date and sets one memorable rhythm. Every worker, engineer and buyer can hold it in mind and keep time to it. The teams are formed around the beat, not the other way round.
An example: The Okpo panel-block shop
The shop had run to that arithmetic on paper for years without flowing. Once the beat was made visible and kept, each block moved on as soon as its station’s work was complete, and on any Tuesday at ten in the morning the supervisor knew which block was at which station.
- 1It enforces order.A team behind on Tuesday is visibly behind by Wednesday morning. The schedule cannot be quietly renegotiated.
- 2It removes waiting and interference.At Boustead the outfitting rate quadrupled with the same people, because no one was waiting on upstream work or colliding in a shared compartment.
- 3It makes progress visible to the workers themselves.A deviation a team can read is a deviation it can own. Discipline imposed becomes self-discipline.
“A yard without a beat is not quiet; it is merely deaf. Its deviations are all still there, but they sound against nothing.”