What is 5S in Lean?

The 5S is a Lean process disciplining technique developed by Hiroyuki Hirano. 5S is made of:

• Seiri - sort
• Seiton - straighten
• Seiso - shine
• Seiketsu - standardize
• Shitsuke - sustain

5S focuses on specific aspects of a process, transforming a wasteful workplace into an organized, efficient, value-generating, and safe environment. The technique is one of the fundamental tools in a Lean environment, ensuring waste reduction.

The technique is part of the Toyota Production System, aka Lean, although TPS itself used 4S, omitting the last step, as it had already been implemented through their workers’ specific culture. Using the method across all organizational levels helps team members to understand, appreciate, and enact their impact on the process and business results.

How to use the 5S technique?

Using 5S in repeating cycles helps teams to continuously increase their standards.

Although the five s-words in Japanese seem slightly different from their English counterparts, it’s only due to translation technicalities. Some phrases were substituted to keep the words starting with s in English too.

Much like Lean and Kanban, the 5S is not a tool available to be practiced well without understanding its philosophy. And the thinking behind 5S, just like in Lean, is that keeping things in order is required for survival, especially in chaotic environments.

Before you kick off your 5S journey, the good idea is to start with mapping your value stream. The reason we recommend this is you first need to know what activities add value to your process. It will guide you in deciding what equipment, services, and inventory items are/aren’t required to keep the process running and improving.

Step 1: Seiri – Sort

It’s the step in which you remove all unnecessary items from your workstation. It can be conducted at any location: in a stock room, on the production floor, or at your desk - it will bring improvements regardless of location. Armed with your value stream, start to take note of all items located in the area. The Japanese word Seiri means to organize. An organized area will help you quickly determine what is needed to perform your work and what isn’t.

In particular, you can achieve a better overview and reduce waste by getting rid of unneeded equipment. For example, it is wasteful to have three identical screwdrivers scattered around the workplace, only to ensure that at least one is at hand when needed. Having a designated space to store one is the way to go.

A note here is that the people charged with getting an area sorted are often the same people who got it into disarray in the first place. Therefore, we recommend that a leader or manager oversees the Seiri phase. They can objectively help staff members implement tags to sort the items located in their area.

Step 2: Seiton – Straighten

This phase deals with locating everything in an appropriate place. Seiso and Seiton are probably the two most challenging phases to get right. Lean practitioners, as well as the founder of 5S, recommend that you consider several factors when choosing a place for each item:

• Frequency of use
• Item’s size and weight
• Team member’s left- or right-handedness
• Item’s safety

Remember that unnecessary motion is considered a waste in Lean, so, for instance, having to go and collect a hammer on the other side of the factory floor, while using it 50 % of the time, is a waste and not in line with Seiton.

Seiton also brings an opportunity to make instructions visual, instead of writing them into work instructions, which are potentially never read – hence are a waste. The correct labeling of where items are to be found and stored is critical here. Some Lean companies have stencils drawn out so that workers know where to put their tools away. Those get placed as clearly visible and easily accessible as possible. Good Seiton means that the employee can now take the required equipment from such a “parking lot” without having to search for it, and after use can put it back without having to leave their workplace.

Also, team members, who had never worked in an area, should easily find what they need, removing the need for long orientation sessions. Another advantage is that it’s immediately apparent when a tool is missing, and employees can check their workstations visually before signing off for the day. Lines drawn on the floor showing where to put items, where people are to walk or stand are fantastic for increasing flow, minimizing costs, and promoting safety.

Step 3: Seiso – Shine

Seiso describes the daily activity of cleaning and keeping a work area as neat as possible. For example, a workshop employee should make sure the floors are clean (minimizing the risk of slipping) and the machinery is free of grime (minimizing the risk of accidents, wear and tear). When cleaning the equipment, the operator can also determine whether the machines are defective and can carry out minor maintenance.

An important point here is that the equipment operator is the best person to keep it clean and in order. Therefore, the act of cleaning it should not be done by a cleanup crew - that would be a waste. Companies, in which leaders are not living the 5S by example in their environments, are merely paying lip service to the concept. Leaders’ involvement and leading of the 5S initiative prevents workers from feeling patronized and spreads the 5S-led improvements across all layers of the organization.

Step 4: Seiketsu – Standardize

The Standardize phase maintains all that the first three phases helped you achieve. Figuratively speaking, you’ve rolled the boulder up the mountain and now need to put a wedge underneath it so that it doesn’t roll down again. In Lean and Six Sigma both, there is a practice of standardization aimed at maintaining what is achieved and preventing variation from causing defects and errors. Standardization in 5S shows how the continuous application of a set of rules will keep an area in a clean and orderly state.

If you look at your workstation, you may find the non-standard tasks that create the mess. E.g., your boss tells you that they need an urgent report, so you drop everything and run to find the required information, you deliver it at the end of the day leaving your desk is a mess and all your other - planned - tasks in tatters. You may even think to yourself, “I am not going to pack this stuff away, just in case they need it again”.

Now, if you had a standardized way of working on everything in the first place, then even unplanned tasks would be possible to manage. You may have just known that a budget report is due every six months, and you would have gathered the necessary data on time. Or, the Seiketsu phase would make you use a one-off exercise to craft a better action plan for the future.

Step 5: Shitsuke - Sustain

The final phase is to keep up the practice. In the book “The 5 Pillars of Visual Workspace”, Hirano expresses how 5S requires a pillar of discipline. Lean managers should use techniques such as Gemba walks to observe and review what’s happening on the factory floor. They can incorporate area checklists, 3-minute blitz cleaning exercises, and company reward incentives to further the discipline. They should perform team assessments with points given for how well they do in all the 5S areas. You can use the table below to see how your company is doing.

The key benefits of using 5S to improve your process are:

• A more clean and clear workflow through visual management
• Less waste in time, effort, materials, more productivity, and increased quality
• Standardized working and workflow methods
• Higher team morale, through individual empowerment to make changes for the better.