The 5S

101 Kaizen Templates: Motion Economy Chart

One of the toughest things that a kaizen consultant has to do is to tear down the results of past kaizens. This is hard because people develop a sense of ownership over the status quo, no matter how bad, and when they have worked to make it significantly better through more>>

Top 10 Success Factors for 5S

We took a quick poll today during a training class for Lean facilitators on their common experiences with barriers and struggles in sustaining 5S efforts as part of a Lean manufacturing implementation. The top 10 success factors for 5S that we agreed on can be grouped as below: Purpose for more>>

5S Know How from the Last Century

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 more>>

Announcing the 5S Challenge Winners!

Thank you Konrad, Ron, Robert, Nancy, Chris, Eric, Jason, Rajdeep and Dee for your thoughtful answers to the question "which of the 5S is hardest and why?" There was a lot of emphasis in on keeping it going, the 5th S known as sustain, shitsuke, self-discipline or stick-to-it. A number more>>

5S Challenge: Which S Is Most Difficult and Why?

"Which of the 5S is most difficult?" I received this question during a class I was teaching recently. I've never been asked this before. People often say "self-discipline is the most difficult" or "sustaining is the most difficult" but this answer never really satisfied me, so after a pause I more>>

Hoshin is 5S for Your Head

Busy, busy days. It's days like these that it becomes more important to avoid working harder, longer and instead take a precious moment out of your day to examine whether what you are doing is really adding value towards the ultimate goal, or not. Crisis creates focus, so long as more>>

E-mail 5S

A Wall Street Journal article today says How You Handle Your E-mail Inbox Says A Lot About You. The article identifies that e-mail is overwhelming people. There is an example of one person who was stressed out by 500 e-mails in their inbox, another who had 10,000 e-mails in their more>>

5S in the Office Saves Space, Expense Money and Time

Here are some photographs from a recent office 5S activity at one of our clients. Both 5S and a redesign of individual desks and workstations are part of the Lean office effort to help improve productivity and quality. The office layout is being redesigned to be more open and visual. more>>

5S Your Desk: And Other Tips for Office Productivity

"I know where everything is." How many times have you heard (or given) this rejoinder to "please 5S your desk"? It's hard to argue the logic of "cluttered desk, cluttered mind" when a desk is an emotionally charged personal space, too often nearly a shrine adorned with family photos, sports more>>

Keys to Sustaining 5S

Visiting a plant tour at a Midwestern cold rolled steel mill today, I had the chance to reflect on what makes a 5S effort sustained and successful. The owner took me through the mill and showed me a line at the start of the tour that was clean and well more>>

Focus on Flow Streamlines 5S

At the core of Lean Enterprise Transformation are the fundamental principles of customer focus, getting rid of the 7 wastes and creating flow. What follows is the alphabet soup of Lean tools in order to achieve this, including but not limited to 5S, TPM, 3P, QFD, 6, SMED, JIT, VSM, more>>