5s Improves Organizational Standards for Efficiency, Effectiveness and Success
5s is a systematic corrective action technique to clean up, get organized and make this the way you do business. In service organizations, the problems identified in 5S not only rob your organizations’ productivity but also your customers. Service environments are especially prone to this waste. Often it is blamed on the lack of standardization. Every job is different. However, how much time searching is spent for misplaced files or sifting through piles of paperwork on desks? How much blame is put on computers and software because of the lack of organization and cleaning taking place? One of the measures used in Office “Kaizen” is percent accurate and complete. This is discussed in several of my podcasts with Mike Osterling and Karen Martin, experts in White-Collar Kaizen. The percent accurate and complete becomes particular important when these duties are handed off to others and to customers.
Many organizations will complete a 5s process without doing the last two steps. It is the act of Standardization that drives Sustainability. Without these components, the gains that you create in the first three will be lost. When a 5s system is implemented, it creates a visual workplace that allows for quick determination of current state. In Service, Sales and Marketing, visual indicators are often non-existent. As Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth said in a podcast to me, “If you are not visual, you are not Lean.” At a glance, we should be able to determine failures in our service system.
I recommend by implementing 5s prior to proceeding with the other components of Lean. Laying a solid foundation for improvement is imperative. I have included several suggestions on this 5S outline.
Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho: “You get better results from average people managing brilliant processes
than from brilliant people managing broken processes.”