5S and Eight Wastes – Part I
Posted on March 17, 2011 | No Comments
Bryan Lund asked:
Lean manufacturing aims to improve businesses. An approach used in many lean initiatives is to involve all people in the management and decision making process. Accompanying this responsibility is the notion that if all people are making business decisions, then those people must be held “accountable”. This word embodies dogmatic management nonsense, another way for over one-hundred years of command-and-control management theory and culture to acquire and hold power. Yet we cling to this rhetoric: empowerment, accountability, as if merely saying the words earnestly will win over the hearts and minds of subordinates. A manager in who is mired in this old mindset will engage subordinates, selling them on ideas and initiatives. The unsuspecting employee sees a change from his formerly hardheaded manager, and willingly goes along with the program, cautiously optimistic if not enthusiastic about the whole situation. In the manager’s mind, the “decision” has been made, the rule has been set, with the employee signaling his willingness to give it a go. The trouble begins when the plan falls apart. Skills have not been acquired, goals not set, problems not fully understood and the manager holds the employee “accountable” for his actions. The employee is frustrated and now mistrusts future initiatives, as he knows that the manager will hold him accountable for the manager’s poor ability to develop the people and the system.
This is a major sore point for any improvement initiative, this problem of mutual trust and respect. Regardless of the program or approach used their must be a willingness to focus on the process and make mistakes. When we see mistakes, we can work together to fix them. In continuous improvement, where problems are constantly uncovered, we must overcome the natural reflex of tuning out our environment, rife with problems, and tackle those problems each and every day. There are two important concepts that help people combat the forces of complacency and wage an all out war against waste. Unfortunately, modern management theory has diluted these concepts down to such meaningless jargon that many people write these off as a fad: “5S” and “The Eight Wastes”.
The 5S plan falls apart when we deviate from the plan: engaging people daily and encouraging them to think about their work. Sadly, for too many companies, this was never the plan in the first place. It was really only to get people to clean up the place. Most managers never see the depth of 5S. Their perception is limited to the opportunity to visit the workplace, but not for the purpose of engaging employees in improvements, but to hold them accountable. Because managers cannot let go of their command and control behavior, which is understandable given the mountains of literature and a century of conventional wisdom supporting this approach, 5S is transformed into another arm of management control systems.
To understand why this is so, we need to understand the basics of 5S: namely the five s’ and how they relate to the “eight wastes”. First, consider the components of 5S for a moment. The Japanese words of seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, shitsuke are used to describe a method for organizing and standardizing the workplace. At the very least, this is the most broadly accepted definition of the system. Let us consider for a moment the English equivalents of these words and have patience as I build my argument as to how modern management theory and the short sightedness of business have warped and destroyed this incredible and revolutionary thinking process.
The Japanese characters for seiri mean: integral reasoning or organization or sorting. The interpretation of this in the workplace to ask oneself: why is this thing here? Do I need it to do the job? Is there a reason why this thing is an important or integral part of the work? In other words, is it value added? The English version of seiri is: to sort out what is needed and not needed. Too many managers will open closets and drawers to question the reason for idle tools in the work area. What problem is under attack with these gestures? The objective is not to throw everything out if we don’t understand why it is there or if someone can’t explain its presence, but to understand the reason why these abnormalities exist in the first place and then correct them through the subsequent 4S’. First we must know what is needed and not needed to do the job.
Seiton is integral arrangement. In one word: orderly or ready. I now have what is only needed for this process. Now, is it in an orderly fashion? If it is not orderly – why? Is it ready for work? If it is information, ready means it is complete and accurate. If it is a person, ready means fully trained. If it is a machine, seiton means capable and reliable. What can I do to make it orderly and ready? It is not uncommon to see managers picking apart the arrangement of machines, people, materials and information on the floor, but for whose purpose? Is the purpose to understand the current situation in the light of problem solving – making the workplace ready and flexible? Or is it perhaps something much more superficial and diabolical?
Seiso is achieving ‘clarity’ through extermination; sweeping or clearing out the contamination of the object we are examining. The object can be anything. We can expand this in the sense of process improvement. In any process there is variability or contamination that doesn’t allow us to see the desired normal state. So, variability is the contamination of the pure process. In English we say shine or sweep. This is most unfortunate, because when a manager gets a stranglehold on 5S, we see these first three S’ take on new meaning. In short we focus on the verb of sorting, setting, and sweeping and not the context of how we think about process improvement. It is not stretching your imagination or the bounds of common sense to come to the underwhelming conclusion that given the short sightedness of management thinking, 5S has become a nationwide housekeeping campaign. No matter how much we clean, it is never clean enough. It gets worse, as we add the final two S’, managers have regained the command and control mechanisms we so love: standards and sustain.
Seiketsu means clear standards. Managers who have been taught to command and control cherish standards, as it excuses us from finding better ways of doing things. In many U.S. plants, the first 3S’ are plastered on the walls in the form of checklists, audits, assessments. This only creates resentment among the masses of workers as managers, who rarely show up on the floor except when people of perceived importance are visiting, decide to surprise their colleagues with a workplace audit in how well they are adhering to workplace standards in the face of ongoing problems that workers receive little help in solving from day-to-day.
Shitsuke means training, upbringing or discipline. In English, we say that shitsuke means to sustain. The image most Americans conjure in their minds when we hear the word sustain is maintain, and it is easy to confuse this with discipline. In a continuous improvement organization, training means to instruct or direct another in their work. Discipline is referring to adhering to the continuous improvement cycle, which inherently requires standardization. Discipline in this case is aimed at management, not the workers. In the case of 5S, we are training others to make further improvements to the standards set.
If you accept what I am arguing as plausible, then I must attempt to answer your question: why then, do we do 5S? One common reason is that we are told it is for the rewards we reap from our efforts. The workplace is organized, clean and safe. The business is “tour-ready” and we assure everyone that we no longer shut down the production lines to clean up for the executives and new customers. Read any mainstream literature on the fundamental principles of 5S, and we see that it is focused on ‘things’ in the workplace. 5S, at least in the United States, is nothing more than a housekeeping program. The fundamental question we have to ask ourselves is this: the very same mainstream literature that espouses the virtues of 5S also claims that it is a cornerstone to a successful continuous improvement program. Again, if you accept that U.S. managers generally treat 5S as a housekeeping program, than how can a housekeeping program be foundational to a continuous improvement program? This not only doesn’t sound right, but 5S isn’t foundational, as we understand it, at any level. The truth about 5S is that the last thing it aims to produce is a clean workplace. Is this heresy? Yes, for some it is. How can I reconcile this argument? Fortunately, I have the concept of “Eight wastes” to rely on.
In the Part II of this article series, we will begin to integrate 5S and the Eight Wastes.
Caffeinated Content
Lean manufacturing aims to improve businesses. An approach used in many lean initiatives is to involve all people in the management and decision making process. Accompanying this responsibility is the notion that if all people are making business decisions, then those people must be held “accountable”. This word embodies dogmatic management nonsense, another way for over one-hundred years of command-and-control management theory and culture to acquire and hold power. Yet we cling to this rhetoric: empowerment, accountability, as if merely saying the words earnestly will win over the hearts and minds of subordinates. A manager in who is mired in this old mindset will engage subordinates, selling them on ideas and initiatives. The unsuspecting employee sees a change from his formerly hardheaded manager, and willingly goes along with the program, cautiously optimistic if not enthusiastic about the whole situation. In the manager’s mind, the “decision” has been made, the rule has been set, with the employee signaling his willingness to give it a go. The trouble begins when the plan falls apart. Skills have not been acquired, goals not set, problems not fully understood and the manager holds the employee “accountable” for his actions. The employee is frustrated and now mistrusts future initiatives, as he knows that the manager will hold him accountable for the manager’s poor ability to develop the people and the system.
This is a major sore point for any improvement initiative, this problem of mutual trust and respect. Regardless of the program or approach used their must be a willingness to focus on the process and make mistakes. When we see mistakes, we can work together to fix them. In continuous improvement, where problems are constantly uncovered, we must overcome the natural reflex of tuning out our environment, rife with problems, and tackle those problems each and every day. There are two important concepts that help people combat the forces of complacency and wage an all out war against waste. Unfortunately, modern management theory has diluted these concepts down to such meaningless jargon that many people write these off as a fad: “5S” and “The Eight Wastes”.
The 5S plan falls apart when we deviate from the plan: engaging people daily and encouraging them to think about their work. Sadly, for too many companies, this was never the plan in the first place. It was really only to get people to clean up the place. Most managers never see the depth of 5S. Their perception is limited to the opportunity to visit the workplace, but not for the purpose of engaging employees in improvements, but to hold them accountable. Because managers cannot let go of their command and control behavior, which is understandable given the mountains of literature and a century of conventional wisdom supporting this approach, 5S is transformed into another arm of management control systems.
To understand why this is so, we need to understand the basics of 5S: namely the five s’ and how they relate to the “eight wastes”. First, consider the components of 5S for a moment. The Japanese words of seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, shitsuke are used to describe a method for organizing and standardizing the workplace. At the very least, this is the most broadly accepted definition of the system. Let us consider for a moment the English equivalents of these words and have patience as I build my argument as to how modern management theory and the short sightedness of business have warped and destroyed this incredible and revolutionary thinking process.
The Japanese characters for seiri mean: integral reasoning or organization or sorting. The interpretation of this in the workplace to ask oneself: why is this thing here? Do I need it to do the job? Is there a reason why this thing is an important or integral part of the work? In other words, is it value added? The English version of seiri is: to sort out what is needed and not needed. Too many managers will open closets and drawers to question the reason for idle tools in the work area. What problem is under attack with these gestures? The objective is not to throw everything out if we don’t understand why it is there or if someone can’t explain its presence, but to understand the reason why these abnormalities exist in the first place and then correct them through the subsequent 4S’. First we must know what is needed and not needed to do the job.
Seiton is integral arrangement. In one word: orderly or ready. I now have what is only needed for this process. Now, is it in an orderly fashion? If it is not orderly – why? Is it ready for work? If it is information, ready means it is complete and accurate. If it is a person, ready means fully trained. If it is a machine, seiton means capable and reliable. What can I do to make it orderly and ready? It is not uncommon to see managers picking apart the arrangement of machines, people, materials and information on the floor, but for whose purpose? Is the purpose to understand the current situation in the light of problem solving – making the workplace ready and flexible? Or is it perhaps something much more superficial and diabolical?
Seiso is achieving ‘clarity’ through extermination; sweeping or clearing out the contamination of the object we are examining. The object can be anything. We can expand this in the sense of process improvement. In any process there is variability or contamination that doesn’t allow us to see the desired normal state. So, variability is the contamination of the pure process. In English we say shine or sweep. This is most unfortunate, because when a manager gets a stranglehold on 5S, we see these first three S’ take on new meaning. In short we focus on the verb of sorting, setting, and sweeping and not the context of how we think about process improvement. It is not stretching your imagination or the bounds of common sense to come to the underwhelming conclusion that given the short sightedness of management thinking, 5S has become a nationwide housekeeping campaign. No matter how much we clean, it is never clean enough. It gets worse, as we add the final two S’, managers have regained the command and control mechanisms we so love: standards and sustain.
Seiketsu means clear standards. Managers who have been taught to command and control cherish standards, as it excuses us from finding better ways of doing things. In many U.S. plants, the first 3S’ are plastered on the walls in the form of checklists, audits, assessments. This only creates resentment among the masses of workers as managers, who rarely show up on the floor except when people of perceived importance are visiting, decide to surprise their colleagues with a workplace audit in how well they are adhering to workplace standards in the face of ongoing problems that workers receive little help in solving from day-to-day.
Shitsuke means training, upbringing or discipline. In English, we say that shitsuke means to sustain. The image most Americans conjure in their minds when we hear the word sustain is maintain, and it is easy to confuse this with discipline. In a continuous improvement organization, training means to instruct or direct another in their work. Discipline is referring to adhering to the continuous improvement cycle, which inherently requires standardization. Discipline in this case is aimed at management, not the workers. In the case of 5S, we are training others to make further improvements to the standards set.
If you accept what I am arguing as plausible, then I must attempt to answer your question: why then, do we do 5S? One common reason is that we are told it is for the rewards we reap from our efforts. The workplace is organized, clean and safe. The business is “tour-ready” and we assure everyone that we no longer shut down the production lines to clean up for the executives and new customers. Read any mainstream literature on the fundamental principles of 5S, and we see that it is focused on ‘things’ in the workplace. 5S, at least in the United States, is nothing more than a housekeeping program. The fundamental question we have to ask ourselves is this: the very same mainstream literature that espouses the virtues of 5S also claims that it is a cornerstone to a successful continuous improvement program. Again, if you accept that U.S. managers generally treat 5S as a housekeeping program, than how can a housekeeping program be foundational to a continuous improvement program? This not only doesn’t sound right, but 5S isn’t foundational, as we understand it, at any level. The truth about 5S is that the last thing it aims to produce is a clean workplace. Is this heresy? Yes, for some it is. How can I reconcile this argument? Fortunately, I have the concept of “Eight wastes” to rely on.
In the Part II of this article series, we will begin to integrate 5S and the Eight Wastes.
Caffeinated Content