Top 10 Tips for 5S Success

There are a lot of benefits to be gained by putting a 5S process in place, but many
organizations fail to successfully accomplish this goal. The following ten
suggestions are intended to help you avoid the failures that others have suffered as
you attempt to make your workplace more swept, straightened, sorted,
standardized, and self-disciplined.

Don't See Your 5S Initiative as a Stand Alone Effort – Besides bringing up

‘program of the month' memories from the past amongst your people, treating your
5S initiative as a stand alone process will create a lot of confusion about why you
are undertaking this effort and will result in the inefficient use of resources. Many
companies use special training, audits, and meetings that have a specific 5S focus
in an effort to get the program going. Instead, you should build 5S practices and
expectations into your larger performance improvement plan and operational
excellence strategies. Similarly, don't form a 5S specific team – instead, build 5S
initiative reviews into your regular Leadership Team and workgroup team meetings.

Require Management to Set a Strong 5S Example – Nothing will kill a 5S effort

quicker than having employees walk by messy managers' desks or work areas
right after they have attended a 5S project update meeting. Just as the Leadership Team should be the most effective
team in a given company, the work areas of managers in a 5S company should be the cleanest and most organized.
Additionally, you should expect every member of management to support 5S practices consistently and regularly – if a
manager sees someone not practicing 5S ideals, they should politely challenge those people and ask them to correct
the behavior or condition, even if that person does not report to them.

Require Every Supervisor and Manager to Enforce 5S Practices on a Daily Basis – The monthly walk through
(high performance workplace audit) discussed below serves as a great tool for providing measurable 5S progress and
for reinforcing the ultimate in 5S expectations, but you should also recognize that supervisors are conducting
performance audits whenever they are out there with their people. What is not said often sends a stronger message
than what is said – if a supervisor walks by someone who is violating a 5S (or other type of high performance)
expectation and does not say anything, they are telling that employee that their behavior is OK. Similarly, the daily
reinforcement of good 5S practices when they are exhibited carries much more weight than saying ‘thank you' to the
overall group in a meeting.

Incorporate 5S Expectations into EVERY Employee's Job Description – If you want your work areas to remain
swept, straightened, and shiny, expect each employee to leave them that they when they go home for the evening.
This is best accomplished by (1) rewriting EVERY job description to include this expectation, (2) emphasizing this
expectation in work group meetings, and (3) providing immediate performance feedback when a workplace does not
meet the expectation at the end of a shift or day.

Clearly, and Visually, Define What Each 5S Workplace Should Look Like – ‘Before and after' pictures of 5S
progress send a strong message about what is expected and will be recognized. Pictures also help people better
understand what each 5S concept will look like when it is actually put in place on the job. You may also benefit from
taking your work groups over to a ‘5S best practice' work area and talking about the differences between that
workplace and how their own currently looks.

Modify Procedures and Work Instructions to Keep 5S Changes Alive – If you want all of your people to adhere to
the “A place for everything and everything in its place” philosophy, you had better rewrite your procedures to include
steps for putting things back where they belong. You also need to make sure that clear, easy to use procedures exist
for disposing of waste or obsolete product or supplies. After all, don't our work instructions define what we are
expected to do at work each day?

Build 5S Expectations Into Your Monthly High Performance Work Practices Walk-Through – Sure, you can do a
special 5S walk-through each month just like you do the monthly safety inspection, but your time will be much better
invested if you create a monthly high performance practices walk through assessment tool and include 5S
expectations as part of it. For example, in addition to looking for consistency of 5S practices, also look for consistency
in the use of visual performance postings, safe work practices, proper lean changeovers, six sigma project support,
and employee awareness of high performance concepts as you move through each workplace.

Include 5S Recognition in Your Regular Employee Recognition Efforts – The best thing you can do is recognize
each team each month that meets or exceeds the minimum score on the high performance work practices walk
through. Avoid the tendency to give out a “Cleanest Workplace of the Month” or a “Most Organized Department”
award, and especially avoid punishing people for being ‘one of the worst'. You only have so many recognition dollars
to spend in your budget – use them to recognize team success against an all encompassing set of high performance
work practice criteria.

Create a 5S Punch List and Show Regular Progress Towards Its Completion – One of the best things about
putting 5S in place is that once you get over the initial hump, it is relatively easy to keep 5S alive. For example, once
you have sorted out all of your obsolete equipment and supplies, you should not have to do those tasks again as long
as your people each fulfill the expectations of their ‘modified' daily job. By creating a single 5S punch list for the whole
facility, reviewing it weekly as part of your Leadership Team meeting (don't form a 5S Implementation Team), and
tracking the percent complete for each action item on the action plan, you can easily keep up with the progress of your
initiative.

Create a 5S Implementation Plan with Milestones that Appreciate Process Evolution – If you follow the above
nine guidelines, you should see progress in a relatively short amount of time. Additionally, you should see little
regression back to where you were when you started your 5S initiative. For example, after 3-6 weeks of consistent
sweeping and straightening up at the end of each day, that behavior should have become a habit, each workplace
should be much cleaner, and the need to emphasize and spend time on these two pieces of the 5S puzzle should be
low. Also, once you have undertaken that big effort to get rid of all of the stuff you have collected over the years and
created a reorganized approach to storage in all work areas, you should not have to worry about doing those tasks
again.

Finally, I hope you can see how other operational excellence and lean six sigma approaches can benefit from using
several of these approaches as well. For example, if you are going to change job descriptions to include a 5S
emphasis, consider including six sigma project support and process improvement tool practice in those changes as
well. In short, build high performance practices, expectations, and measurements into the larger work systems.