Japankaizen

After being stuck for about two months, I’ll start my “kaizen” blogging. Now, I am going to talk about 5S, another simple yet powerful concept that becomes “a package” together with kaizen. 5S stands for 5 initials of following Japanese words:

1. Seiri

2. Seiton

3. Seiso

4. Seiketsu

5. Shitsuke

According to siliconfareast, is a structured program to systematically achieve total organization, cleanliness, and standardization in the workplace. A well-organized workplace results in a safer, more efficient, and more productive operation. It boosts the morale of the workers, promoting a sense of pride in their work and ownership of their responsibilities.

According to Japanese, 5S is a set of steps for improvement. As we might know that improvement itself is kaizen. So, is short, 5S is one of ways to implement kaizen. In detail, 5 S can be explained as follow:

Literally, seiri means put things in order (organize them) according to specific rules or principles. In practice, this refers to actions to distinguish between necessary things, and getting rid of what we do not need. This means the act of throwing away all unwanted, unnecessary, and unrelated materials in the workplace. People involved in Seiri must not feel sorry about having to throw away things. The idea is to ensure that everything left in the workplace is related to work. Even the number of necessary items in the workplace must be kept to its absolute minimum. Because of seiri, simplification of tasks, effective use of space, and careful purchase of items follow.

This fist simple concept of 5S will be very useful if it can be implemented in daily life of any organization. We may see (I saw it at my own room too L), that there so many unnecessary things around us. If we try to count it precisely, we may get 40:60% useful and unuseful things. Suppose we have only useful things, that are related to our work, then how much space we can save, how many seconds saved for searching only to get particular things that we want.

The essence of this step is to reduce space and time for searching. Moreover, fewer things scattered around us make our room cleaner.

Than we might have problem in implementing this, what is that? Yes, it would be very easy to get rid of unuseful thing if we really sure that those are unuseful. What if someday we may need it, or may not? What if we don’t need it only for this time only, tomorrow, next month, or next year, who knows we might need them? Well, please continue to this

October 13th, 2007
Categories: Kaizen's Steps . Author: japankaizen

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