We are going through a fairly thorough 5S exercise of our server. Just over 22GB of files were red tagged last week. Of the few items that were salvaged from the red tag folder was a series of notes by Brad Schmidt, President of Gemba Japan.

These were from a Lean transformation engagement at a Midwestern aerospace company in 1999 that had its rough spots, if memory serves. Here is some 5S know how from Brad, rescued from the red tag bin:

5S Training

Insist on giving people training about kaizen and the 7 types of wast before doing 5S with them. If 5S doesn't make sense to them, they will oppose it.

Tops of Cabinets

Always check on top of machines and cabinets. A whole bunch of stuff is up there.

Nest of Vipers

Wires, air hoses, and hydraulic lines on the floor make cleaning it hard. Get them off the floor. Think of these as a nest of vipers.

Less Self-discipline

Encourage people to do a good job on the first 4S so you don’t have to rely heavily on the 5th (self-discipline) which no one likes anyway.

5 Star Hotel

Treat 5S in the workplace just like a 5 Star hotel idea. You don’t spit in a 5S hotel.

Make Drawers Visual

Put photos of what’s in the drawer, so you don’t have to open it to find out.

Great stuff. Yet the last one troubles me. How would we ever put photos of what's in our server, on our server? There are tens of thousands of files in there, and they all look like this:

Thanks Brad, for writing down these 5S lessons you learned in 1999, before Lean manufacturing was a required phrase in every publicly company's annual report, when the New Economy was the big idea, and when Toyota was just a foreign car company trailing behind Ford and General Motors in sales, hardly worthy of study by Midwestern aerospace companies.