5S System - Shine

Intoduction to the Five S's

Regular cleaning: Once you have everything, from each individual work area up to your entire facility, sorted (cleaned up) and organized, you need to keep it that way. This requires regular cleaning, or to go along with our third S, "shining" things up.

Regular, usually daily, cleaning is needed or everything will return to the way it was. This could also be thought of as inspecting. While cleaning it's easy to also inspect the machines, tools, equipment and supplies you work with.

Regular cleaning and inspection makes it easy to spot lubricant leaks, equipment misalignment, breakage, missing tools and low levels of supplies. Problems can be identified and fixed when they are small. If these minor problems are not addressed while small, they could lead to equipment failure, unplanned outages or long - unproductive - waits while new supplies are delivered.

When done on a regular, frequent basis, cleaning and inspecting generally will not take a lot of time, and in the long run will most likely save time.

The other Five S's are: Sorting - Systematic Organization - Standardize - Sustain