5s Una segunda mirada

LEAN

A Second Look At 5S
by James Van Patten

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few years ago I attended a conference of lean practitioners—most of them consultants as it turned out. Given that lean had fallen out of favor—replaced by Six Sigma— much of the hallway conversations concerned the promotion of lean and its benefits. Discussing the future of lean consulting, one

In 50 Words Or Less
• 5S is not simplyabout cleaning up a shop floor. • It’s an idea that reshapes how you think about a workplace and provides a foundation for significant improvement. • It’s a way to change how people approach their work, workplaces and each other.

very senior manager of a well-known consulting firm summed up his perspective with the statement, “We can’t expect to sell 5S anymore. I mean, after all, we’re justcleaning up a client’s shop floor.” Heads nodded in agreement, and the conversation moved to some of the more concrete benefits of lean. I was taken aback by the statement that 5S involves simply cleaning up. The consultant had missed the point of 5S—and I wondered whether many of his clients missed the point, too. 5S has the potential to deliver tremendous benefits, and the cleaning up part is merelyone of its more obvious byproducts. But to ensure a 5S campaign delivers what it’s capable of, it needs to be understood and implemented as much more than cleaning up. 5S is an idea that reshapes how you think about the workplace and provides a foundation for all improvement.1 The idea of 5S, when understood on that level, has wide application and great power. For example, one company used 5S torationalize its product line, reducing products offered by twothirds and transitioning current clients to the product numbers that remained. The general manager said to me, “I saw what 5S did for our production
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lines, so I used it to straighten out our product lines, too.” Another company used 5S to organize a warehouse and in theprocess learned that much of the slow moving product stored was due to cancelled distributor orders. This led to a revision of distributor agreements and better management of their distribution system. A third company used 5S as a way of developing an organizational lifestyle of improvement: empowering all employees to find and implement ways of bettering their workplaces immediately while notrequiring a lot of time or management approval. It used 5S as the common roadmap for improving everything from machine uptime to safety, inventory, quality and morale. What made these and other organizations successful was understanding that 5S is not a cleanup. It is a prescription for dramatically changing how people approach their work, their workplaces and each other.

employees are expected to beorganized, neat, clean, standardized and disciplined in everything they do. By practicing the 5S’s, an employee’s work and workplace will be continually improved by becoming more organized, neater and cleaner. This is why practicing the 5S’s has sometimes been called a lifestyle.

A Lifestyle Becomes a Project
The effect of substituting a list of five English verbs for the original Japanese wordis subtle but profound. It refocuses 5S from a set of characteristics to embody into a set of activities to complete. That is, 5S changed from an ongoing effort to practice a new lifestyle to a cleanup project defined by five steps, each beginning with the letter S. As a project, 5S now had a beginning and an end. It became possible to “do a 5S” rather than “practice the 5S’s.” It is as if ourBoy Scouts decided to “do trustworthy, loyal, helpful and friendly” this week, then do something else next week. But practicing the 5S’s does require activity; that is, it’s not possible to be clean without cleaning or to be organized without putting things away. Successful organizations integrate the 5S activities into the daily work rather than separate them into projects or events. They...