5S Workplace Organization
What is 5S?
5S is a five step workplace organization method. It is designed to help stabilize a variable process and create standard work where it does not exist. Possible signals for the need to use 5S could be:
- an area where it is hard to find what you are looking for such as a tool or folder
- an electronic filing system that is disorganized or requires a lot of searching to find what is needed
- team members asking how to do something multiple times due to lack of adequate training or instructions
Sort– determine which items in the area are necessary and which are unnecessary. After getting approval from your team and leadership, remove the unnecessary items. In this picture to the right, red tags have been placed on items that are not needed in the area.
Set in order– organize the work area to allow for the best work flow. This does not always mean alphabetical or numerical order. This is a progressive improvement where items already nearby are placed as close to the point of use as possible. Set in order applies to both large and small areas. Small areas may be a bookshelf or a bench or desktop. In the small areas, you should aim for locating items within inches of your reach and line of sight. Larger
areas should cut the number of steps.
Shine– clean and inspect the work area. Clutter is also a form of contamination that builds by the minute in the form of extra parts from previous jobs, old paperwork, packaging material, junk mail – an endless list of useless items that are by products of work.
Standardize– document proper organization of the work area and make it easy to tell when things are out of place. Standardization puts a structure to the process (who, what, where, when, how) to ensure that every employee understands and adheres to the standard. A great question to ask yourself on this step of 5S is “Could someone who knows nothing about your work area find things they need and put them back where they go?” Management’s role in standardization is to be sure that standards are maintained by all.
Sustain– take action to ensure that the work area stays organized including audits and communication of results. The most common complaint about 5S is “we couldn’t sustain it.” 5S may begin as an event, but thereafter is a never-ending daily process in which the 5th S, Sustain, means not only sustaining the gains, but also to keep improving workplace organization. Finally, if 5S is to become part of every employee’s workday, management must update policies and job descriptions which might inadvertently undermine 5S.
5S FACILITATOR’S GUIDE
Examples of 5S improvements
Here is an example where we used 5S to organize a work area. What differences do you see between these two pictures? After organizing this space, we had much more room and we were able to find things we needed.
Here is another example. This person used to store their reports in 3 different folders. Here is their story in their own words: “It takes 12 clicks per email to get all three reports attached to the email or loaded into Report it. When all was said and done, I was clicking in and out of reports a minimum of 85 times just to get reports emailed or uploaded. It is also a time consuming process to jump around from folder to folder and make sure that the all the correct reports have been uploaded. It was time for a change… Now I can get each report emailed or uploaded in 4 clicks altogether and at a much faster pace. Saving me over 80 clicks navigating to each folder for each time I need to attach or upload a report.”
Not only can 5S help things look more clean and organized, but it can also lead to improved business results. A team of recruiters at a staffing company was able to get the results outlined below by applying 5S to their process instructions for recruiting:
- Before 5S: 40% of jobs sent out to recruiters within 30 minutes, after 5S 95%
- Before: 50% of job posting had correct job info, after 91%
- Before: 60% of web job posted same day, after 93%
- Before: 40% eblast emails sent the same day, after 67%
Hopefully you can get results like this or even better when you apply the 5S principles to your daily work.