Excel is where most takt time tracking begins. A shared spreadsheet, a daily update process, a chart that supervisors check at end-of-shift. It works — until it doesn't. Understanding where Excel breaks down helps clarify what dedicated software actually provides.
Excel is flexible, familiar, and free. For a small facility with one production line and one supervisor, a well-designed Excel tracker can provide meaningful insight into daily performance. Standard hours, actual times, a simple adherence calculation, a chart — these are well within Excel's capabilities.
For a CI engineer building a Yamazumi from collected time data, Excel is often still the right tool for the analysis step, even when the data collection happens elsewhere.
The fundamental limitation of Excel is that it is not live. An Excel tracker shows you what happened — after someone entered the data. The entry process introduces delay, introduces errors, and requires someone to do it. That person is usually the supervisor, who has other things to do.
At 20 operators across 3 production areas, manual Excel data entry becomes a significant burden. At 50 operators, it becomes unmanageable. The data is always late, always incomplete, and always requires reconciliation against what actually happened versus what got entered.
TaktClock eliminates the manual entry step. Operators log in and start a timer — the session data is recorded automatically. No one enters numbers after the fact. The dashboard is live because the data collection is live, not because someone updated a spreadsheet.
The supervisor who was spending 30 minutes per shift updating a tracker now has 30 minutes back. The plant manager who was waiting for an end-of-shift export now has live status. The CI engineer who was building a Yamazumi from exported session logs now has a live Yamazumi built from today's sessions.
Excel remains useful for analysis. It stops being useful as the data collection mechanism once your floor has more sessions than one person can manually track.
30 minutes. Live screen share. We'll configure it against your areas, your processes, your standard hours.