Paul Ducey
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Lean for Beginners: Cannabis · Lesson 5 of 10 · Week of November 9

Takt and leveling: set the beat

Lesson 4 was about making what's needed. This lesson is about how fast and how evenly. Takt gives you the pace the customer sets. Leveling spreads the work so the pace stays steady, instead of a rush followed by a wait. In a business that grows plants, neither one can speed up a plant. Both can change how rooms, people and orders line up around the plants.

By the end of this lesson you can:

  • work out takt time, and say what it is and isn't;
  • work out how many stations or people a step needs to keep up with takt;
  • say what pitch is and use it to check the pace in small steps;
  • explain leveling by volume and by mix, and name unevenness (mura) and overburden (muri) when you see them;
  • use a harvest cadence to work out how many rooms and how many cuts a steady week needs.

You need Lessons 1 to 4 first. This one builds on the idea that orders are not demand, and on the habit of planning back from the shelf.

Takt: the pace the customer sets

Takt time is the time you have to work, divided by how many units the customer wants in that time. If you work 480 minutes a day and customers want 240 units a day, takt is 480 ÷ 240 = 2 minutes. Every 2 minutes, one unit has to be finished for demand to be met.

"Takt" is the German word for a precise beat, like the beat in a piece of music. The idea comes from the German aircraft industry of the 1930s, where it kept airframes moving forward at fixed intervals, and Toyota later adopted it.

Two things to hold on to:

  • Takt is set by demand, not by what you can do. It isn't how fast you can go. It's the pace the customer requires.
  • Takt is worked out ahead of time. It's a target you plan to, not a number you report afterwards.

Takt and cycle time

Cycle time is the time it actually takes to do the work at one step, measured by watching it. Put the two side by side. If a step's cycle time is longer than takt, one person or one machine at that step can't keep up with the customer.

The simple fix is to run more than one in parallel. In a simple case, stations needed = cycle time ÷ takt.

An example, with made-up numbers. Takt is 2 minutes, and one step takes 6 minutes. 6 ÷ 2 = 3, so three people or stations doing that step side by side keep up. The other answer, telling one person to work three times faster, is the wrong one. Pace beyond what people and machines are designed for is called muri, overburden, and it creates waste of its own.

Takt in a business that grows plants

A plant doesn't care what your takt is. Takt can't make flower finish sooner, and it doesn't set how long a cultivar flowers. Some Lean teachers say takt fits poorly in continuous-process work and in work with extreme variety. A crop on a fixed biological clock is another case where takt can't set the pace.

What takt does do is set a cadence: how often a batch should be harvested and released so that supply matches what sells. From the cadence you can work out how many rooms you need, and how many trim and pack stations to run alongside them. The people-work downstream of the harvest is where takt fits best.

Here is a way to count rooms. Little's law, from Lesson 4, applies to rooms as well as packages: rooms needed = (weeks a batch spends in the room + weeks to turn the room over) ÷ weeks between batches. A flower room that holds a batch for 9 weeks, plus 1 week to clean and reset, with a harvest wanted every week, needs 10 rooms.

What biology fixes, and what you can change

  • Fixed within a cycle: how long a clone takes to root (about two weeks in the studies I checked, 12 to 16 days), how long a cultivar flowers (56 to 80 days across ten cultivars in one study, with the days reported by growers), and how long drying takes for the method you use. "Flowering takes eight weeks" is a rule of thumb, not a law.
  • Yours to change: how many cuts you take each week, how long plants veg, which day a room flips, and how many rooms you run.

Cultivars that mature about two weeks apart need flips offset by about that much if you want their harvests to land together. And plan from the cut, not from the plant: in one research run, harvest came about 15 weeks after the cut was planted, before drying, cure and the test hold. A change in demand reaches the shelf months later, and you take more cuts than plants you need, because some cuts won't root and some plants get culled.

Pitch: checking the pace in small steps

Takt is the beat for one unit. Work usually moves in containers, such as a tray, a tote or a case. Pitch is takt times the number of units in a container: the time to make one container.

If takt is 1 minute and a tote holds 20 jars, pitch is 20 minutes. Every 20 minutes a tote should be done. That lets you check the pace as you go, in 20-minute steps, instead of finding out at the end of the shift that you were behind. A tote that is late at 20 minutes is a signal to look, at 20 minutes and not at 480.

Leveling: smooth the schedule, not the customer

Heijunka means leveling the type and the quantity of work over a fixed period. It comes in two kinds:

  • By volume. Do about the same total each day or week, and let finished stock absorb the ripples in demand.
  • By mix. Instead of making all of product A and then all of product B, repeat a small pattern, such as A, A, B, C, D. Small batches in a steady ratio.

Suppose buyers want three parts of strain A to one part of strain B every week. Leveling by mix means each week's flips split into three slots for A and one for B, so both come out every week. The alternative, six weeks of A and then two weeks of B, makes long gaps and long stock.

A heijunka box is a board with a slot for each product and each time interval. It releases work, usually kanban cards, at fixed intervals so the pattern runs as planned.

Mura, muri and muda

Three Japanese words show up together:

  • Muda is waste. You met it in Lesson 2.
  • Mura is unevenness: hurry, then wait.
  • Muri is overburden: people or machines pushed beyond what they're designed for.

Unevenness creates overburden and waiting, and both create waste. Level scheduling is the remedy for mura. James Womack separated two kinds: unevenness that comes from the economy, which you can't level, and unevenness your own schedule makes. Leveling is for the second kind.

An example, with made-up numbers. A trim crew of 6 handles most weeks. Then every room is harvested in the same week, and 60 people are needed for two days. The customers didn't change. The harvest was batched. That is mura, and it causes muri while it lasts and idle people afterwards.

What leveling can't touch

  • Leveling changes when batches start, not how long they run. Don't level by shortening dry, cure or the test hold. Those are quality steps.
  • A steady cadence isn't automatically level. Unequal rooms, uneven cut counts or a changing cultivar mix can still make lumpy weeks.
  • Demand is steadier than orders. Massachusetts adult-use sales were $1.56 billion in 2023. The best month ever, December 2023, was $140.1 million. An average month that year was about $130 million, so the best month was roughly 8% above it. That suggests large swings further back in the chain come from ordering and scheduling more than from shoppers. It doesn't prove it for your floor.
  • Leveling by volume wants a buffer, and a licensed canopy is space people don't want to lose. Under 70% sold over six months, the Commission may reduce a cultivator's tier (Lesson 4). In practice cultivators are reluctant to give up canopy, so "grow less" is rarely the answer, and this lesson doesn't tell anyone to. A different way to level is downstream. Keep the harvest cadence steady, and let the product mix absorb the ripples: when packaged-flower demand dips, a lot might become pre-rolls, go to extraction, or be sold in bulk wholesale. That is my reading of leveling by mix, not a rule, and each route has its own customer and its own clock.

The arithmetic: from a weekly harvest back to the cut

Every number below is made up to show the steps. Yours will differ, and none of these is a benchmark. Suppose one room is harvested every week.

An example, with made-up numbers. Each room is 600 sq ft at 3 sq ft a plant, and gives 45 g of sellable flower per sq ft. Flower takes 63 days (9 weeks), room turnaround 7 days, rooting 14 days, veg 28 days. 90% of cuts root, and 10% of rooted plants are culled. Dry takes 10 days plus 4 days to turn the dry room over. Hand trim is 450 g per person-day, in 5-day weeks of 480 minutes.

  1. A batch: 600 ÷ 3 = 200 plants. 600 × 45 = 27,000 g, or 27 kg, which is 135 g a plant. Demand is 27 kg a week.
  2. Rooms: takt is one batch a week. A room's cycle is 63 ÷ 7 = 9 weeks of flower plus 1 week of turnaround = 10 weeks. 10 ÷ 1 = 10 rooms, which is 10 × 600 = 6,000 sq ft of flower canopy.
  3. Cuts: survival is 0.9 × 0.9 = 0.81. 200 ÷ 0.81 = 246.9, so take 250 cuts a week. Check: 250 × 0.9 = 225 rooted, and 225 × 0.9 = 202.5, which covers the 200.
  4. From cut to harvest: 2 weeks rooting + 4 weeks veg + 9 weeks flower = 15 weeks. Dry rooms: 14 days is 2 weeks, with one batch a week, so 2 rooms.
  5. Trim: 27,000 g ÷ 5 days = 5,400 g a day. 480 minutes ÷ 5,400 g = 0.0889 minutes, or about 5.3 seconds a gram. For a 450 g tray the pitch is 5.33 × 450 = 2,400 seconds, which is 40 minutes. One trimmer needs 480 minutes for a tray, so 480 ÷ 40 = 12 trimmers. Check: 5,400 ÷ 450 = 12.
  6. The same harvest, all at once: if all 10 rooms are cut in one week, that's 270 kg. 270,000 ÷ 450 = 600 person-days, or 120 trimmers a day for 5 days, against 12.
  7. If packaged-flower demand falls to 18 kg a week: 9 kg a week now has no home as packaged flower, and only 18 ÷ 27 = 66.7% of the harvest would sell that way. You have choices, and the arithmetic helps with each. You could take fewer cuts: 18,000 ÷ 135 = 133 plants, and 133 ÷ 0.81 = about 165 cuts a week. Or you could decide where the 9 kg goes instead: pre-rolls, extraction or bulk wholesale. In its 70% review the Commission looks at total wholesale transfers. Either way nothing changes for 15 weeks, and until then the surplus is (27 − 18) × 15 = 135 kg.

Notice step 7. The plan can only change what you cut today. What is already growing arrives 15 weeks later no matter what the order book says. That delay is the reason cultivation plans from the shelf back, and the reason a level cadence beats a surge. It's also why, after a demand dip, the question is so often "what should this flower become?" and not "how do we grow less?"

Knowledge check

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Your task: look at the beat

This is a walk, not a project. You change nothing.

  1. In your area, find the last four batches that left it. That might be harvests, pack runs, deliveries or restocks. Use records.
  2. Write down how many days passed between each one and the one before it.
  3. Write down the headcount for each day last week.
  4. Finish this sentence: "Batches were __ to __ days apart, and headcount ranged __ to __."
  5. Then answer one question: did that pattern come from customers, or from the schedule? Don't explain it and don't fix it yet.

Record days and headcounts only. Leave out yields and product names.

Open the printable beat sheet

Your floor, your data. What you write on a worksheet stays with you. It is paper, and nothing you write on it reaches this site. If you talk about your floor in public, keep it general: leave out license numbers, batch or package IDs, supplier and customer names, and any number your employer treats as confidential.

Sources

Where the facts in this lesson come from. Facts last checked October 1, 2026. If you find one that is out of date or wrong, tell me.

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