Shop type 03
On short runs you are not scheduling cycle time. You are scheduling setups.
Machining schedules break on the things that sit either side of the cycle: the setup, the fixture that another job also needs, and the long run that finishes at 3 a.m. whether anyone is there or not.
Governing constraint
Setup can dominate short-quantity work, and a shared fixture makes two otherwise unrelated jobs compete for the same hour.
Diagram: setup share of machine time
Qty 5
Setup 62% · Run 38%
Qty 40
Setup 26% · Run 74%
Qty 250
Setup 7% · Run 93%
Same part, same machine. Only the quantity moved.
Illustrative proportions drawn for this page to show how setup share changes with quantity. Not measured shop data.
01What changes here
What this work does to a schedule.
Setup and run must be separate numbers
A four-hour setup on a run of five parts is most of the operation. Folding it into an average per-part time makes small jobs look cheap and large ones look expensive, and both figures are wrong.
Fixtures and tooling are their own constraint
Two jobs may each fit the machine calendar and still collide because one fixture exists. Without modelling that, the schedule looks feasible and the floor disagrees.
Unattended cycles cross shift boundaries
A long run can continue past the end of a manned shift, but a setup cannot start after it. Available hours differ per operation type, not just per machine.
Second operations depend on the first, not the clock
Op 20 needs the parts from op 10 in hand. When op 10 slips a shift, op 20 has to move with it rather than sitting in a queue as though the parts arrived.
02What Takta models
Handled for machining work.
In development
Setup time separate from run rate
Both entered per operation, so quantity changes the schedule the way it changes the floor.
In development
Sequential operation dependencies
Later operations start from the actual finish of the previous one, not from a fixed queue position.
Specified, not built
Shared resource contention
A fixture or tool marked as a limited resource that two operations cannot consume at the same time.
Specified, not built
Attended vs unattended hours
Work centers with different available hours depending on whether the operation needs someone present.
Not planned for the first release
CAM programming and tool libraries
Takta will not hold programs, tool tables or offsets. That stays where it is today.
Not planned for the first release
Machine monitoring and automatic run capture
No spindle monitoring, controller integration or automatic time collection is part of this product.
Not covered
- No CAM, post-processing or program management.
- No machine connectivity, MTConnect or telemetry.
- No inspection, CMM or first-article reporting.
03Next
If this is your shop, we want your routings in front of us.
Early access is a conversation about how you schedule today, followed by an invitation to try the first release when it can genuinely help.