5S: What Lies Beneath
by Gwendolyn Galsworth, PhD
The 5S Audit has one foundational problem, and it cannot be cured on paper. Without addressing that problem, all other changes will be quickly absorbed and we will still be left with a compliance tool that most of us have to push associates to use-instead of a creative tool that engages, enlivens, and educates. What to do?
First we must ask the question: What's the matter--why can we not sufficiently resurrect a traditional 5S Audit? Because traditional 5S--the mother ship around which the audit is organized has no internal learning mechanism-no central thesis, theme or premise. As a recent cinematic flop put it: "What's lies beneath?" As I put it: What is at the heart of the 5S process? If the answer to this is not substantive and meaningful, 5S is a tool, not a strategy. Here is how I respond to that query: At the heart of 5S and the audit that supports it is compliance. And compliance has no lever save good old-fashioned discipline and repeatability.
Lean has a heart--time. Lean's ticking clock races to the finish line on a foundation of standard work and with the precision of pull. Quality has a heart--the satisfied customer, with us finding and then marching down the causal chain to solutions that, if they don't exist right now, are invented. Visuality has a heart--motion and the information deficits that cause it, with visual devices as the solution, creating a workplace that speaks.
But 5S does not have a beating heart. I, for one, think that is telling and very, very important. In a way, we have already discussed this. 5S is important. 5S is needed. 5S is required.
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