Table Of Contents hide 1 From the manufacturing floor to clinical settings, today’s businesses rely on complying with complex and highly regulated processes to create products, treat patients, and deliver an excellent customer experience. 2 Understanding the 5S System 3 How Does 5S Contribute To Lean Manufacturing? 4 Visual Management: Improving Performance and Communication 5 Is Visual Management Part of 5S? 6 Visual Management: Improving Performance and Communication 7 Incito’s Lean 5S Process: A Customized Approach to Visual Management and Visual Controls 8 What Are Examples of Visual Management? 8.1 Call Buttons or Stoplights 8.2 Signage 8.3 Progress Boards 9 Want to learn more? Schedule a consultation. From the manufacturing floor to clinical settings, today’s businesses rely on complying with complex and highly regulated processes to create products, treat patients, and deliver an excellent customer experience. Business leaders are always on the lookout for tools to improve communication and performance management. The 5S approach to workplace organization–a type of lean visual management–can help overcome common challenges and improve productivity in the workplace. Understanding the 5S System The 5S System serves as visual shorthand for five steps to help companies eliminate waste, gain control over the workplace, and ensure that processes are being followed as efficiently as possible. The five steps include: Sort: Go through your team’s workspace to identify which tools and areas are essential. Eliminate all distractions and waste. Straighten: Optimize your workspace organization, with every tool in the exact spot where it’s needed most. Provide clear guidelines to your employees on how the workspace should be organized at all times. Shine: Establish cleaning routines and plans that keep your facility up to company, industry, and regulatory standards–at all times, and with minimum time spent. Standardize: Share simple, visual guides to your most important company goals and processes that reduce mistakes, eliminate wasted time, and make it easy for your team to always follow procedure. Sustain: Take the necessary steps to ensure that your 5S-related improvements are sustainable over the long-term. How Does 5S Contribute To Lean Manufacturing? Lean manufacturing thrives with improved processes and efficiency. By eliminating unnecessary waste and distractions, your workers can get more done without adding to their workload. The 5S system improves the manufacturing process and allows your team to be more productive without significantly impacting their time and resources. By implementing the 5S system in your lean manufacturing process, your team members will spend less time on small but time-consuming tasks. Optimizing workspaces and eliminating waste helps achieve this goal by cutting down on time spent looking for tools, navigating through the factory, and other tasks that waste time. Visual Management: Improving Performance and Communication Lean visual management systems like 5S are designed to provide effective information flow and communication through visual signals and controls, which allow your organization to perform at the highest levels. Management clearly communicates its most important priorities. Workers always have a quick, easy-to-understand reference to guide them through the steps of a complex process or make informed decisions about what to do next in their work. Forward-thinking organizations understand the concept of building stability and improving capability through safe and effective Visual Management and Visual Control Systems. 5S–and other lean approaches to visual management–can help companies to optimize their workspace and improve the flow of information. Is Visual Management Part of 5S? Visual management comes into the process as part of its implementation. Adding visual cues related to lean manufacturing throughout the workplace and communicating the process to your employees makes it easier to standardize your processes. It also helps improve the workflow within your manufacturing space. Strategies like color-coding tools and other items associated with various steps of your process enable employees to replicate the process. Organization is a big part of lean manufacturing, and it’s a key component of 5S. Under your previous system, you may have located employees responsible for adjacent parts of the manufacturing process far away from each other, making handoff less efficient. With 5S, these two groups would be located near each other so they didn’t have to waste time walking to the other side of the factory. Visual Management: Improving Performance and Communication Lean visual management systems like 5S are designed to provide effective information flow and communication through visual signals and controls, which allow your organization to perform at the highest levels. Management clearly communicates its most important priorities. Workers always have a quick, easy-to-understand reference to guide them through the steps of a complex process or make informed decisions about what to do next in their work. Forward-thinking organizations understand the concept of building stability and improving capability through safe and effective Visual Management and Visual Control Systems. 5S–and other lean approaches to visual management–can help companies to optimize their workspace and improve the flow of information. Incito’s Lean 5S Process: A Customized Approach to Visual Management and Visual Controls Incito Consulting’s team provides expert guidance on implementing 5S strategies and visual management controls that are customized to your unique industry needs and business environment. Participants will learn how to plan, deploy, assess, validate, sustain, and continuously improve the process of: Understanding how visual controls and visual management systems work Identifying a unique strategy for how 5S consulting can help optimize your workplace organization, information flows, and essential workplace processes Standardizing your company’s approach to visual controls and visual management systems Developing mechanisms to ensure information sharing among individuals, departments, and divisions Training participants on how to assign zones of responsibility Developing and deploying visual control and visual management systems Learning how to develop and execute visual management and visual control audit programs for continuous process improvement Establishing visual management and visual control standards customized for your organization including: Colors Labels Signs Borders Locations Forms Assessment Tools A smooth workflow begins with an optimized workspace. 5S and other visual management systems help companies eliminate waste, set up the workplace for maximum productivity, and easily communicate expectations and processes to managers and workers. By employing visual management tools, you’ll be providing your team with the information and support they need to achieve their most challenging business goals. Are you ready to explore how 5S workplace organization and lean visual management systems could help transform your business? Contact Incito Consulting today to learn more. What Are Examples of Visual Management? To best deploy your lean manufacturing strategy, you can use some of these visual management examples. Call Buttons or Stoplights In manufacturing, problems or mistakes are common, but if they aren’t caught quickly, they can disrupt the whole process. Adding a call button or stoplight that employees can use to stop the process to resolve problems as they arise makes the process more efficient. A warning light or alarm would serve as a visual cue that lets quality control or support staff step in and take care of problems when they happen. Signage Before your employees become familiar with the 5S system as applied to lean manufacturing, add signage throughout their workspace. This will remind them of the process and help them learn the steps needed to reduce waste and be more productive. Adding clear signage to waste areas, recycling, tool storage, and other critical areas in your lean manufacturing plant helps new employees find them without a lot of hassle. Your employees won’t have to waste time looking for parts and tools when they are well organized and their storage location is easy to find. Progress Boards Whiteboards and other communication tools are great visual management tools for lean manufacturing. Use them to tell your employees what they’re working on for the week or how far along they are in a certain project. Prominently displaying progress reports lets your team know how well the lean manufacturing system is working. It gives them a sense of how much more productive they can be with improved workspaces and processes. Are you ready to explore how 5S workplace organization and lean visual management systems could help transform your business? Contact Incito Consulting today to learn more. Want to learn more? Schedule a consultation. About how Incito can help transform your business and tackle your most important strategic challenges.
