Accelerate Cycle Time

Accelerate Cycle Time

Accelerate cycle time is step four of the Algorithm, the five-step operating sequence Jon McNeill sets out: once a process has been questioned, cut down and simplified, make it faster. The claim that matters is not the acceleration but the precondition. Speeding up a bad process only produces bad output faster, which is why the step comes fourth and not first.

What it is

Cycle time is the elapsed time a unit of work takes to move through a process from start to finish. The term is long-standing industrial engineering and lean manufacturing vocabulary and has no single originator. What belongs to McNeill is the placement: acceleration is the fourth move in a fixed order, after questioning the requirement, deleting what is unnecessary and simplifying what remains.

He states the dependency directly at page 76. The first three steps are enablers and must come before acceleration. He introduces the idea there as something he was exposed to early in his career, and does not name the tradition it comes from.

In effect

A bakery chain wants loaves out of the oven sooner. Pushing the ovens hotter is acceleration. Checking first whether every proving stage is necessary, removing one and simplifying the shaping, then shortening the cycle, is the Algorithm's order, and it avoids burning bread on a line that still carries a redundant step.

The practical value of the step is therefore diagnostic rather than technical. A team that finds itself reaching for speed before it has removed anything has skipped three steps, and the acceleration will magnify whatever was already wrong.

What it does not say

It does not say cycle time is McNeill's idea. It is established industrial engineering and lean vocabulary, and the credit for the idea belongs to the Toyota Production System and its authors. McNeill's contribution is the ordering.

It does not rest on research. This is a practitioner framework rather than a tested effect, and nothing in it has been assessed against a literature here.

It does not license the numbers. Any cycle-time figure given in the book is unsourced and should not be carried.

Sources

  1. McNeill, J. The Algorithm. Chapter four, pp. 75 to 97. Step four of five. Page 76 states that the first three steps must precede acceleration.
  2. For the underlying idea, cite the Toyota Production System and its authors, including Taiichi Ohno, rather than the book.