5S Philosophy

Should you be struggling with the implementation of maintaining a visual workplace, you would be advised to try the 5S Philosophy. Most of the process improvement activities for a manufacturing process start with 5S that ensures the survival of the company. 5S stands for the 5 disciplines which help the business owner maintaining a visual workplace.

What are the 5 disciplines of 5S?

Let's look at a brief explanation of the 5 disciplines which make up the 5S program.

  1. Sort - The objective of this step is to ensure that all the items not needed for operations are removed from the workplace. With all the unnecessary items removed only essential ingredients for the manufacturing process stays. This is done by focusing on excessive inventory, quality mismatches and tools which are not required. Pictures of the workplace are taken before and after the sort process.

  2. Set in Order - The objective of this step is to ensure that one can access the items needed for the manufacturing process very easily. Let us consider an example of manufacturing a chair. Initially, the process estimated that it would require 50 items to be present to complete the manufacturing. After the Sort process, the list pruned down to 25. The employees of the manufacturing cycle would need to know how and where to access these 25 materials. This will allow them to easily find these materials, use them and discard them off the process.

  3. Shine - Quite often, this stage is referred to as the maintenance stage of every process. 5S emphasizes on waste reduction from the tools and equipments by ensuring that they are clean at all times. One would sweep, wipe off equipments and paint them to ensure that the equipments are clean. Employees also create inspection checklists for the implementation team to check the state of the equipments regularly.

  4. Standardize - The first 3 steps do most of the heavy lifting in terms of driving wastes off the process. This step documents procedure which the employees would need to follow to maintain step 1-3 in a closed cycle. Various duties relating to the first 3 steps are integrated to the daily work-life of the employees. Tools like 5S Job Cycle Charts, 5 Minute 5S and Visual 5S activities are used to drive the implementation of this stage.

  5. Sustain - Once the procedures are documented, the process needs to be sustained. This is done by the Sustain stage of the process. Sustain provides ongoing support to the 5S initiatives of the organization.

The step-step implementation of the 5S stages will in all likelihood ensure that wastes are reduced off the manufacturing processes of the organization enabling it to be a 5S Organization workplace