The illusion of 5S
“In sciences that are based on supposition and opinion… the object is to command assent, not to master the thing itself.”
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1960
Throughout my humble life, I have been consulting quite a few manufacturing firm. Many of those implemented lean philosophy, applied lean manufacturing. One thing that virtually any firm would do is 5S. And guess what…After some time, they got frustrated and quit. The story went like this.
- The VP of Manufacturing comes in one day and introduced Lean Manufacturing to the team. We will start continuous improvement. If we do this, we will improve our factory.
- People got excited about the next new thing.
- Some folks sighted: “God. Not again?”
- The first thing is to do 5S
5S. 5S everywhere, everybody doing 5S. People clean up the workstation. People re-organize the parts. People sort the tools. People sweep the floor. Everything is shining. Everyone is delighted.
Managers specially love 5S. Why? Because they can take a picture, not one picture but tons of it, sticks onto the dashboard and show to the Board of Management to get huge applause. See, clearly our effort has been fruitful. Hey look at these pictures. Now our factory would be trim, slim and lean.
Except one thing, after a few months, things get back the way it had been.
That is why a staggering number of Lean program becomes futile.
But why are the managers so obcessed about 5S?
Because it produces immediate result so that our boss can see it and feel good about it. See, look at those beautiful photos.
Doing lean like this is dangerous, because it has no objective, no mission whatsoever. Yeah we clean, we sort, we standardise, so what? The dynamics and flow as well as the way we operate the factory is still the same. You are treating the symptom, not the aetiology of the disease ifself.
There is a funny joke but contains meaningful idea about 5S. Suppose you are sick, you are infected by bacteria and feel really ill. Your room is messy and you slept all day in that spooky room. Doing 5S now is like cleaning the room while you are sick of infection. Certainly if you clean the room, it would be better. However, the problem here is you are infected by bacteria. You need to go to doctor. You need presciption and antibiotics to kill the germ, not cleaning, sorting and standardizing the room.
That is why I recommend re-thinking about 5S. It is certainly a nice thing to have. But using it to cure your factory low performance disease is hopeless.
What we need is not the fancy photo, but the metric and KPIs of the workstation and the factory in the longrun. That is what we care when we do 5S.
