LEAN 5S: A Lean Leader’s Strategy for Sustaining
The lean 5S system contains 5-steps to achieving a more organized, controlled and efficient manufacturing plant. These steps are Sort, Set-in-Order, Shine, Standardize and Sustain. And in this article, I discuss the fifth and easiest step in the 5S process, and that is the Sustain step. Here is what lean leaders need to do to ensure long-term 5S success:
Make it easy to sustain!
- Stop the process leaks. Kaizen team members spend many hours and a lot of effort getting through the first four 5S steps. You can imagine how frustrating it can be if after all of this amazing effort, the machines were leaking oil on the floor and the process was spewing airborne particulate everywhere. So as part of your continuous improvement efforts, you gotta fix those pesky process leaks.
- Upgrade the shopfloor lighting. I’ve walked through many shops that are so dark and dingy that it looks like nighttime even on a clear sunny day. Its crazy this is still the case in so many shops in this day and age. LED lighting conversions will brighten the shop and the upgrade usually has a fantastic financial payback. If your shop doesn’t have good lighting, then sustaining and improving the housekeeping will be difficult.
- Floor scrapping, scrubbing and mopping needs to be part of your efforts. After a 5S kaizen event, floors are the first areas to fall victim to dirt. You just need to understand this and have a plan to address them in the short run, and the long run.
- Paint can help. Not every kaizen team is allowed to paint their production areas and equipment because of certain factory GMP requirements. But if you can paint, you should. Painting floor shadow locations and shadow boards looks much better and longer lasting than using colored tape. Also, using paint to color-code your process controls supports a lean visual factory initiative. So use paint to refresh your production area and color code things to create a visual factory.
- Limit flat surfaces. Flat surfaces collect clutter, dust and debris so limit flat surfaces as much as possible.
- Avoid the use of closed cabinets. These are just opportunities to hid clutter.
Nobody likes audits!
While 5S audits can be useful as the last line of defense against backsliding, it can’t be the primary means. The other activities that I mentioned are much more affective methods for 5S sustainability. In fact, the best lean plants that I have ever seen, plants that really do a great job of maintaining their 5S environment and demonstrate best-in-class visual controls, use other means besides audits to maintain their outstanding results.
Here is an example of what not to do. I was on a call with a director of manufacturing a little while ago. He was frustrated with their 5S results. They conducted a few internal 5S kaizen events, but their progress was slip-sliding away. After some back-and-forth dialog, I learned that their primary means to sustain their progress was daily operator 5S audits. They were using a standard 5S audit form that didn’t directly apply to their processes.
After a few weeks of completing 5S audits that are overly generalized, operators tend to not be thorough and will eventually avoid doing them all together. When the audits are not specific to their particular process, they fail to see the point of doing a daily audit. I mean can you blame them? Let’s face it, no one likes taking surveys or doing audits. And when the audits are too frequent and overly generalized, they lose their effectiveness.
Imagine a daily financial audit that had questions like; 1) Are the numbers accurate? 2) Are the numbers legible? 3) Are photocopies clear? 4) Are pages properly collated? 5) Are the pages wrinkled? I know this would be ridiculous, but some of the 5S audits that I see are just as silly.
So before implementing 5S audits, consider your strategy. How frequent should they be? Who should do them? How specific can you make them? What other structures do you have in place to sustain and improve your 5S results?
The Sustain step is the easiest step of 5S methodology. You simply make sure that your plant management staff is committed and then build your success during the first four steps and maintain a continuous improvement mindset.
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