How to Manage Your Red Tag Hold Area
It’s important that a 5S kaizen team is efficient at what they do. Let’s face it, when you pull a team of 10-15 employees together for a few days, you can’t afford wasted labor time. A kaizen team needs to be provided ways to make quick decisions with regards to their 5S efforts, especially during the sort-step of the 5S methodology. This is why a Red Tag Hold Area can be so very beneficial.
You want your kaizen team to keep only exactly what is needed in the production area. No more than what is needed and no less than what is needed. As the team strips the production area down to only the essentials, they will need a place to quickly put all of the unneeded items. This may be things like tools, spare parts, supplies, workstations, and even raw materials. This is where a Red Tag Hold Area comes into play. This area provides a specific, roped off area where a 5S kaizen team can move unneeded items until a disposition can be made at a future date.
Now if the team can quickly move an item to its proper long-term location, then they should most certainly do that. But often, finding the proper long-term storage location, isn’t that easy. When a team comes across items that should not be stored in production, but finding a good storage location is difficult, then a Red Tag Hold Area provides that short-term staging area.
In this regard, you want to have the kaizen team to use this Red Tag Hold Area liberally. The mentality of the 5S team should be, “when in doubt, move it out”. The team is better moving something out of the production area and then later learn that they actually need it. This is because if they are overly aggressive at sorting things out, then they can then just simply move the item(s) back later. Being overly aggressive during a sorting operation is a much better scenario than keeping a bunch of unneeded things that become obstacles to operational efficiency.
How do you effectively use a Red Tag Hold Area?
- It starts with good communication. You want to explain it to everyone in the plant. Let everyone know what a Red Tag Hold Area is and what it is not. It is a temporary storage location for the kaizen team. It is not a scrap heap or place for a shopping spree. Everyone needs to know that they should not remove anything from the Red Tag Hold Area without first discussing it with the kaizen leader.
- Rope it off and label it. This staging area should be away from the project area and it should be roped-off and posted with a sign that states: Do not remove anything from this area. For information, please contact… (provide kaizen leader’s name, email address & phone number).
- Document it. The Kaizen Leader should have a written inventory of the items in the area, and they should keep track of the item dispositions. If you use two-part red tags, then this becomes easy to track. The red tag copies act as inventory cards.
- Get help! Shortly after the kaizen event, the Kaizen Leader should email out a list of the items that are stored in the Red Tag Hold Area and ask people for help. They can even assign certain dispositions to specific resources. Say for example that there is a used servo motor that the team moved to the Red Tag Hold Area. In this case, the Kaizen Leader can assign that disposition to the Maintenance Manager. So, the inventory list can be emailed out with disposition assignments. This creates accountability and streamlines the disposition process.
- Have a blind auction. You may not find a business need for every item in the Red Tag Hold Area, but these items could still have some value. In these cases, selling things on eBay or another auction site may be an option for you. However, many plants find that selling items on eBay is too cumbersome and distracting for the business and its usually simpler to use an employee only, blind auction process.
- A final word of caution. Don’t scrap equipment or materials without a management consensus. Sometimes there is an untold story behind what looks like scrap equipment and scrap material, and it can prevent an easy disposition. Ultimately, it’s a kaizen leader’s job to find and investigate these untold stories and to guide the plant leaders into making good business decisions.
The 5S Red Tag Area is a great tool to use during the sort-step of a red tag event. It helps streamline the sorting process while still allowing for intelligent item dispositions. This area is only a temporary location and the goal after every 5S event should be to eliminate the Hold Area within 30 days. Doing this requires post-kaizen accountability for each Red Tag Hold Area.
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