Clean Up Your Room! The “5S” Factor

Seems like our parents were onto something what they admonished us to clean our rooms.

The Morey Corporation’s Lean journey started for us roughly 18 months ago with the implementation of 5S: Sort, Simplify, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain.

The concept of 5S is to take an established area, Sort out all the items not needed daily to do the job, Simplify where everything needed daily should go (label spots), Shine the area by cleaning it, create a Standard (usually a picture) that would show what that space is to look like at all times, and Sustain by identifying how often you are re-doing the 5S’s to make sure the workspace looks like what the standard says it should look like.

I was designated to be the resident expert on 5S for MOREY, which required me to not only learn the 5S’s but to apply them across different functions (manufacturing floor, office departments, common areas). My initial opinion was, “Oh, so you just clean up your space really well, and you are done”, which was no different than the normal person who waits until the day before a long weekend or vacation to do a complete cleaning of their space, so if anyone from management stops by while they are gone, at least they look organized. After interviewing colleagues who had backgrounds with 5S, I started to understand the overall principle was to set up a workspace where the product being produced could be done with any needed tools or items within arms reach.

I (like many people) have always been a person who liked to believe that my desk was “organized chaos” and that I truly knew where everything was. I even had an extra cart that sat behind my desk to hold the files and paper overflow from my desk.

In a manufacturing company, you also have the tendency to “collect” different parts, components, samples over the years while working with any one of 200 different products. This comprised the space under my desk.

So, in my start into 5S, I had to ask the question of “What here is needed every day to do my job?” and then either filing or trashing the rest. What wound up happening was letting go of a large amount of things that served as a safety blanket over the years, like paper copies of electronically stored emails and samples of years old components we no longer used. We tend to feel much safer when we can hold something tangible rather than knowing it’s backed up on a hard drive somewhere or available somewhere in the building. As I was throwing things away, I found myself asking internally, “Why did I keep this for so long?” and realized I was starting my evolution into a world of lean thinking.

The final result for me was a desk that had only items on it that I needed to do my daily job. I thought it looked great, but wasn’t prepared for how much it increased my efficiency. All of a sudden, I knew exactly where everything was at all times.

When assisting in the 5S implementation in production, I found how much efficiency and quality had improved by just making sure the right tools had a space at the right operations. Workers were no longer spending time looking for tools or components and then having to go back to their station and saying, “OK, where was I?” This started to catch on rapidly throughout the production floor. My job then became to try and make believers out of employees that were part of the office.

It helped out greatly that most people had remembered what my desk looked like and were willing to try a “new thing” that worked for me. We still had those people that were resistant to getting rid of their “paper” and believed in “organized chaos”, but they started to see a change where everyone was talking about how 5S helped them and how there were no embarrassing feelings when a manager or customer walked by. Slowly but surely we started to see a much more organized, efficient, and quality driven organization.

David Seifrid is currently the Manager of Planning and Customer Support at The Morey Corporation. He is the author of “Lean Into It,” a MOREY blog dedicated to the day-to-day aspects of Lean implementation.