Category Archives: Lean Glossary

5s: Lean Glossary

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5s: What Is It?

5s is a method of organising a workplace to reduce unnecessary clutter, unnecessary movement (the waste of motion), and ensure “a place for everything and everything in its place”.  It is called 5s after the five steps used to implement it in a workplace.

In western terms, 5s is:

  1. Sort:  Sort out and remove unnecessary items.
  2. Straighten: Organise the essential items so team-mates can find materials quickly.
  3. Shine: Clean the area and work tools
  4. Standardise: Put into place regular cleaning, and review of items necessary
  5. Sustain: Ongoing monitoring of the implementation for continuous improvement

These were derived from the original Japanese 5s of:

  1. Seiri:  Separate needed from unneeded items—tools, parts, materials, paperwork—and discard the unneeded.
  2. Seiton:  Neatly arrange what is left—a place for everything and everything in its place.
  3. Seiso:  Clean and wash.
  4. Seiketsu:  Cleanliness resulting from regular performance of the first three Ss.
  5. Shitsuke: Discipline, to perform the first four Ss.

An Example of 5s:

Macy the Mechanic works with cars and tools all day.  She places a red tag on all her tools, and removes the tag if she uses it.  At the end of the week she sorts out 10 things that she actually doesn’t need or use.   Macy then arranges her tools to be close at hand (so she doesn’t have to reach or walk to get them) and hangs them on a board.  Macy also places “footprints” or “shadows” where the tools live, so she and everyone else knows where to put them back when they are finished using them.

Lastly, Macy puts in place a regular schedule of cleaning and maintaining the tools at the end of the day – degreasing and keeping them oiled – and keeps the standard process for this next to the tools as well, showing the next scheduled time and person to complete it.

In the office, Mark the Mailroom guy arranges the boxes for his incoming and outgoing mail to different floors so that they are labelled clearly and can be reached easily when walking down the mailroom path.  He also creates green cards to hang on a hook above any box that has mail in it, so he can see at a glance which ones need to be actioned and which ones are free.

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5 Whys: Lean Glossary

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The “5 Whys”: What Are They?

The 5 Whys are a very simple method of getting to the root cause of a problem or an opportunity.

They are often used after narrowing down our problem by starting with a Fishbone diagram, which separates the problem into different areas like People, Information, Process and Systems.

The Five Whys method is based on continuously asking “Why” something occurs until the real problem is revealed.  For example, a job in your company might be taking longer to complete than it should to complete.

“Why?”  The job is held up in one department with large backlogs of work.

“Why?”  They have to wait for information from multiple sources.

“Why?”  No one knows what information is specifically required to complete the process.

“Why?”  The correct information has not been made visible or easily accessible.

We can validate our “Five Whys” by reversing them and replacing “Why”, with “Therefore”.  If it still makes sense, then there is a good chance we have a valid root cause.  Here is an example:

The correct information has not been made visible or easily accessible.

“Therefore”, no one knows what information is specifically required to complete the process.

“Therefore”,  they have to wait for information from multiple sources.

“Therefore”, the job is held up in one department with large backlogs of work.

“Therefore”, a job in your company might be taking longer to complete than it should to complete.

When we have our possible root cause to the problem, we can delve deeper by gathering any required data, timings, rework and making is visible with a Value Stream Map, and then see where to start using the 80/20 rule and a Pareto Chart.

When implementing the 5 Whys, we don’t necessarily have to ask Why five times, five was simply noted to be the most common amount of times asked before the true root cause was revealed.

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Lean Glossary of Terms

Below is a list of Lean terms and links to their explanations.  Click on any item to learn more about it.