How many times have we heard the warnings?
"Our biggest customer is coming (or the boss, or some shareholders, or OSHA) and we need to clean this place up!"
So we have two days to "clean this place up!" Lucky for us we have a few well trained firefighters that can work and hide stacks of files, miscellaneous inventory, and review those customer reports so we can ship them out early tomorrow morning. Everything else comes to a screeching halt. Did I just hear one of the supervisors whisper that this looks like a 5S Blitz?
The big day arrives, everyone looks busy, the boss looks at the Ops Manager and says, "I smell soap!"
Or...
The big day arrives, everyone is busy, catching up on two days of downtime, when our favorite customer arrives. "All of your office areas smell so clean!"
She is getting the 5-Star treatment. Walking through the areas, seeing a white board with tracking numbers next to the reports they ordered with status of "Delivered" next to them. The Office's Operations Manager is smiling, and gives the customer a box of branded office swag, cups, banner pens, and flash drives, on her way out the door.
For those of you who honestly think this is what a rapid 5S Event looks like or that 5S is Housekeeping, I have a little secret for you. You are wrong, not mistaken, and those who told you that were wrong. For the rest of us this is turns into an effort in futility and the clutter will return in about two weeks.
There is a way to avoid all the dramatics, and fire-fighting. The site has to become organized. This is not something that a small group can accomplish, it's going to take everyone from the employees all the way up to the Leadership team.
5S is a system of organization that helps us answer the following questions:
Sort - Do we need everything we have?
Set in Order - Do we have everything we need?
Shine - Can we see abnormalities?
Standardize - Can anyone do this repeatedly?
Sustain - Are we maintaining or backsliding?
Each "S" is built on the previous, and it starts by Sorting to remove the fog of clutter. If you see half eaten bags of cheesy poofs laying around, listen to the voices in your head and throw them away. When we Set in Order we are removing searching waste. We are no long a hunting and gathering society, work should be the same. The work of Sorting and Setting in Order is executed by the smart people. The actual people doing the actual work knows what is needed or not needed. The boss can come participate, but only as a set of hands doing work.
When we Shine we are keeping our machines (printers, computers, network drives, etc) in a like new condition so we can see a small problem before it becomes a much larger problem. How often does the printer go down because you ran out of paper in the office or because little hang-ups turned into an issue where we have to call the guy who sold us the printer four months ago?
When we Standardize we are documenting how we do things. Is there a standard method to creating folders on the servers for new projects? How about projects that are complete or abandoned? How long does it take someone to find the information they are looking for?
Sustaining the gains involves Leadership being active in the change process and I don't mean they only move their furniture around. Take a waste walk, go to the gemba! That is the actual place where the actual people are doing the actual work. Does the work flow?
One of these days the customer, or the boss, or OSHA is going to stop by unannounced...
Don't just shake your head up and down, share what you have seen in the comment box.
"Our biggest customer is coming (or the boss, or some shareholders, or OSHA) and we need to clean this place up!"
So we have two days to "clean this place up!" Lucky for us we have a few well trained firefighters that can work and hide stacks of files, miscellaneous inventory, and review those customer reports so we can ship them out early tomorrow morning. Everything else comes to a screeching halt. Did I just hear one of the supervisors whisper that this looks like a 5S Blitz?
The big day arrives, everyone looks busy, the boss looks at the Ops Manager and says, "I smell soap!"
Or...
The big day arrives, everyone is busy, catching up on two days of downtime, when our favorite customer arrives. "All of your office areas smell so clean!"
She is getting the 5-Star treatment. Walking through the areas, seeing a white board with tracking numbers next to the reports they ordered with status of "Delivered" next to them. The Office's Operations Manager is smiling, and gives the customer a box of branded office swag, cups, banner pens, and flash drives, on her way out the door.
 |
| LOVE the banner pens!! |
For those of you who honestly think this is what a rapid 5S Event looks like or that 5S is Housekeeping, I have a little secret for you. You are wrong, not mistaken, and those who told you that were wrong. For the rest of us this is turns into an effort in futility and the clutter will return in about two weeks.
There is a way to avoid all the dramatics, and fire-fighting. The site has to become organized. This is not something that a small group can accomplish, it's going to take everyone from the employees all the way up to the Leadership team.
5S is a system of organization that helps us answer the following questions:
Sort - Do we need everything we have?
Set in Order - Do we have everything we need?
Shine - Can we see abnormalities?
Standardize - Can anyone do this repeatedly?
Sustain - Are we maintaining or backsliding?
Each "S" is built on the previous, and it starts by Sorting to remove the fog of clutter. If you see half eaten bags of cheesy poofs laying around, listen to the voices in your head and throw them away. When we Set in Order we are removing searching waste. We are no long a hunting and gathering society, work should be the same. The work of Sorting and Setting in Order is executed by the smart people. The actual people doing the actual work knows what is needed or not needed. The boss can come participate, but only as a set of hands doing work.
When we Shine we are keeping our machines (printers, computers, network drives, etc) in a like new condition so we can see a small problem before it becomes a much larger problem. How often does the printer go down because you ran out of paper in the office or because little hang-ups turned into an issue where we have to call the guy who sold us the printer four months ago?
When we Standardize we are documenting how we do things. Is there a standard method to creating folders on the servers for new projects? How about projects that are complete or abandoned? How long does it take someone to find the information they are looking for?
Sustaining the gains involves Leadership being active in the change process and I don't mean they only move their furniture around. Take a waste walk, go to the gemba! That is the actual place where the actual people are doing the actual work. Does the work flow?
One of these days the customer, or the boss, or OSHA is going to stop by unannounced...
Don't just shake your head up and down, share what you have seen in the comment box.
Nice banner pen :p very shiny
ReplyDeleteThanks Monica! And for those of you playing the home edition of Lean, just replace "Customer" with "Gram-ma".
DeleteThis isn't a blog--it's a documentary! In my organization, the same person that said "I smell soap", also had the annoying habit of sliding around in his alligator shoes in the oil.
ReplyDeleteHere's the problem with that---pick one thing to gripe about! The smell of soap, or the oil!!! If you build from a green field perspective, and get to plan everything, that's one thing. But---when you're stuck with a piece of machinery that was purchased based on the "say so" of an engineer staring at semi-nude women under the guise of "supplier development" then it's quite another.
And another thing--when you're the manager, we all know you make more money than we do. Don't rub it in by wearing your fancy shoes in our working environment.
Not bad, Not bad at all. However, I worked in a plant that was trying to achieve ISO/QS 9000. The weekend before the initial audit we re-wrote the entire quality system.
ReplyDeleteThe auditor's quote when he walked in?---"I smell ink"
This would be another example of not using standard methods and documenting them in a repeatable fashion. Rewriting the entire system only decreases employees trust that bad situations can be fixed permanently.
Delete