5S for Work
What do you associate with 5S? Many of you might understand that 5S is to clean or keep your workplace neat. The definitions of 5S (Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu and Shitsuke) themselves are quite simple. Yet the interpretation of them, in reality, varies a great deal depending on people. Those who flout 5S, taking it as a mere cleaning, will not be able to find any meaning in implementing 5S. On the other hand, those who take 5S as a starting point for Kaizen may understand the significance of the activities, as they have already experienced that putting necessary items in order after disposing unnecessary items helps them reduce variance in their operation, and consequently enables them to standardize their processes. Even those people, however, are likely to concentrate their own 5S activities on materialistic matters such as inventory, WIPs or tools.
The supreme goal of 5S is to improve work itself by putting a scalpel into true causes or factors that have generated those materialistic matters. This activity requires to be backed by the firm notion that the necessary and the unnecessary must be determined from the viewpoint of your customers, not that of your own organization. Fully-implemented 5S for work itself is effective enough to greatly improve quality and productivity since you can eliminate inventory or so-called security costs which you have taken for granted as a necessary evil.