Why is cycle time important for small custom steel fabrication shops?

Cycle time is one of the key inputs for understanding the real capacity of your shop. When you know how long cutting, drilling, welding or painting actually take, you can estimate how many pieces each workstation can produce per hour, whether you can hit promised delivery dates and where your true bottlenecks are. For EZIIL's ICP (5–50 person custom steel shops), realistic cycle times are the foundation for reliable schedules, on-time delivery and healthy margins.

How do you calculate cycle time at a workstation?

Cycle time is usually calculated by dividing the total processing time by the number of units produced. For example, if a saw runs for 60 minutes and cuts 30 pieces in that period, the average cycle time is 2 minutes per cut. In practice, fabricators measure a few batches and use the average as a standard cycle time for that operation. In EZIIL, you can define planned hours for each operation and then compare them to reported hours from the shop floor to refine your typical cycle times over time.

What is the difference between cycle time and lead time in a steel job shop?

Cycle time is the internal touch time of a process step, such as cutting, welding or blasting, measured while the workstation is actively working on a piece. Lead time is the total elapsed time from when a job or part is released to production until it is finished, including waiting, queues, transport and pauses between departments. In other words, a saw may have a cycle time of 2 minutes per cut, but if parts wait half a day before and after cutting, the lead time for that step is much longer. EZIIL helps distinguish these by showing planned vs reported hours on operations and also by visualising where jobs are waiting in the process.

How can I use cycle time to plan capacity and throughput?

Once you know a workstation's cycle time, you can estimate its maximum throughput. For example, if welding a base plate takes 15 minutes per piece, one workstation can theoretically weld 4 pieces per hour, adjusted by a realistic efficiency factor. That helps you answer questions like: How many beams can we cut in a shift? How many stair stringers can we weld this week? EZIIL's planning view uses the hours you assign to operations to show how loaded each department is, making it clear where you are overbooked and where you still have capacity.

How can I reduce cycle time in my steel fabrication processes?

Cycle time can be reduced by eliminating wasted motion and improving the way work is done at the station. Typical actions include better fixtures and jigs to speed up positioning, standardising setups, pre-preparing consumables, improving work instructions, reducing rework and ensuring materials arrive to the station complete and on time. Continuous improvement focuses on the process itself, not just pushing people to work faster. EZIIL supports this by making plan vs actual hours for each operation visible, so you can spot which workstations or operation types are consistently slower than expected and then improve them deliberately.

How does EZIIL help track and analyse cycle times?

In EZIIL, every project is broken down into operations by department, such as cutting, fitting, welding or painting, each with planned hours. Workers report time against these operations through a simple task view on desktop or mobile. Over time, this creates a real history of actual processing times for different products, profiles and operation types. The Analyse and plan-vs-reality views in EZIIL then show where operations take longer than planned, which departments are overloaded and how cycle times differ between jobs. This gives small fabricators the kind of data that larger plants use to optimise their processes, without complex spreadsheets.

Can EZIIL handle different cycle times for different products or projects?

Yes. EZIIL is built for custom, project-driven metal fabrication where cycle times vary by product and complexity. You can define operations and planned hours per project or per phase, so a simple handrail and a complex mezzanine frame can have different routing and cycle time assumptions. As you collect actual hours from the shop floor, you can update your templates and typical times for recurring work types like stairs, platforms or frames, so future projects start from realistic cycle times instead of guesswork.

How accurate do my cycle times need to be for scheduling in EZIIL?

Cycle times do not need to be perfect to be useful. For most small steel shops, a good starting point is realistic averages based on experience or a few timed jobs. As long as your planned hours are in the right ballpark, EZIIL's schedule and resource view will already be far more accurate than a whiteboard or static spreadsheet. Over time, as you track reported hours vs planned hours in EZIIL, you can tighten those estimates, update your standard times and gradually improve both your planning accuracy and your quoting.

How does cycle time connect to WIP and lead time in a steel job shop?

In a job-shop environment, long cycle times and too many open jobs (high work-in-progress, or WIP) combine to create long lead times and constant firefighting. According to Little's Law, lead time depends on both WIP and throughput: if cycle times are high and you push too many projects into the shop at once, everything slows down. By measuring cycle times and seeing real capacity per department in EZIIL, you can limit WIP, choose which jobs to release and plan realistic due dates, which shortens lead times without overloading your team.

How can I use cycle time data from EZIIL to improve quoting and estimating?

Reliable cycle time data helps you quote hours instead of guessing. For example, if history in EZIIL shows that cutting and welding a typical frame takes a certain number of hours per metre or per ton, you can apply those proven rates when estimating a similar project. EZIIL's plan-vs-reality reports show where you systematically under- or over-estimate, so you can adjust your standard times, rework allowance and hourly rates. Over time, this means fewer underpriced jobs, more predictable margins and more confidence when saying yes or no to new work.

Who in a steel fabrication company should monitor cycle time metrics?

Typically, the production manager, planner and company owner all benefit from watching cycle time metrics. Planners use them to build realistic schedules and allocate work across departments. Production managers use them to see which workstations are slowing projects down and where improvement is needed. Owners and directors look at cycle time and plan-vs-actual data in EZIIL to understand whether the shop is getting more efficient over time, whether they can take on more work with the same team and where investments in tooling or training will pay back the fastest.

Cycle Time

Q: What is cycle time in steel fabrication?

Cycle time in steel fabrication is the total processing time it takes to complete one unit of work at a specific workstation, from the moment the operation starts to the moment it finishes. For example, the cycle time to cut a beam might be 5 minutes from saw-start to saw-finish, or 15 minutes to weld a base plate. It does not include the waiting time before or after the operation.

What is Cycle Time in steel fabrication?

Cycle Time is the total time it takes to complete one cycle of a process, from start to finish of a single unit of work.

In steel manufacturing, cycle time usually refers to the processing time at a station (not including wait time before/after).

For example, the cycle time to cut a beam to length might be 5 minutes (from when the saw starts on a piece to finishing that cut). Or the welding cycle time for attaching a base plate could be 15 minutes per piece.

Cycle time is a key metric in understanding capacity. If a workstation’s cycle time is known, you can compute how many pieces it can produce per hour.

Reducing cycle time means each task is done faster (perhaps through better tooling or methods), which can increase throughput.

It’s important to differentiate cycle time from lead time. Cycle time is typically a process-internal measure (often just the “touch time”), whereas lead time is the total time including waits.

In a job-shop environment, standard cycle times may vary by product, but having typical cycle times for common operations helps with estimating and scheduling. For instance, knowing that your saw’s cycle time is 2 minutes per cut on average allows scheduling 30 cuts/hour (with some efficiency factor).

Continuous improvement aims to cut down cycle times by eliminating inefficiencies in the process itself.