Effi ciency


The concept of preventative maintenance embedded within seiso (shine) is another aspect of 5S that elevates it above simple desktop or offi ce organisation.


Regular attention to the information coming into your offi ce ensures that you’ll know if projects are in danger of falling behind schedule or if invoices are at risk of not being paid on time – and enables you to act before the situation becomes critical. Seiketsu (standardise) demands the development of a precise routine for the most easily controlled element in a chaotic environment – cleaning and organising a workspace. At fi rst blush, this may seem unnecessarily anal – I mean, do you really need a system for cleaning out your email inbox and processing the papers that piled up during your holiday? Nevertheless, there’s wisdom in the concept. Having a system for processing and cleaning up all the information in your offi ce means that you’ll get through the activity faster and with a lower risk of missing something important. The deeper value of developing a system for a task like 5S, however, is that it acts as a springboard for the development of standard work for other areas of your job.


Allison did embark on a rigorous 5S programme, throwing out the stuff that she didn’t need and organising her paper and electronic fi les according to frequency of use. This simple change provided her with the ability to actually see what needed her attention and to stay focused on it. As a result, she reduced the cognitive distractions that kept her from really focusing on her writing. ‘Shining’ her work provided her a regular status update on her research


paper and helped defi ne a plan for her to get the work done.


Finally, standardising her 5S activities helped her to develop the discipline to do her academic research more frequently instead of allowing it to sink, literally and metaphorically, below the piles of trash in her offi ce, or get pushed aside by other competing commitments. To be sure, the rigour of


5S isn’t a panacea for all her problems, but she now regularly spends two to three hours per week on her research and is hoping to publish a paper before the end of the year.


Systemic information 5S As I mentioned earlier, 5S applies to both physical and electronic information and, so far, I’ve been talking about using it for personal information management. But applying it to the information fl ows within an organisation is perhaps an even more powerful use of the tool.


Think of the reports that you produce or read: how many of them show similar or even identical information? How many of those reports do you really need? I know of one IT department that produced more than 350 reports per month for the company’s managers and executives. As part of a 5S initiative, they analysed all the reports, spoke to their customers (ie the executives) and eliminated the obsolete reports, the redundant reports and the non-user friendly reports. They reduced the volume to 37. Similarly, a nursing team at Covenant Health System in Lubbock, Texas took the 5S chainsaw to the overwhelming paperwork burden that threatened to crush them daily. Before they deployed 5S, nurses spent an average of


6.1 hours per 12-hour shift on documentation. Collectively, they handled over 2.2 million forms each year. Even worse, documentation errors often weren’t detected for three to fi ve weeks after patient dismissal.


A comprehensive 5S


initiative involved simplifying, combining and standardising forms, leading to a 40% reduction in paperwork and a 48% reduction in time spent fi lling out documentation6


.


Each nurse recaptured three hours per shift to spend with patients – the activity that they not only love, but which also creates the real value for the patients/customers. In these two examples, the 5S principles of seiri (sort) and seiton (set in order) were used to reduce systemic waste – of time, effort and energy – and helped workers spend more time doing something important for customers. This broader application of 5S to the management of information is just as important in reducing waste as the individual application, but has greater impact on both individual and group productivity.


Remember, it’s a means to an end Let’s be honest: there’s something about 5S and organisation in general that feels trivial at best and remedial at worst. But that’s only because you’re thinking about the process and not the objective.


What you’re really trying to do here is make it easier to spot abnormalities and waste, allowing you to focus on creating value for your customers.


From this perspective, you can view 5S as a fundamental building block, rather than remediation: it’s the foundation of the cathedral of value that you’re erecting.


Management Services Spring 2012


11


References 1 Cutting Files Down to Size, by Pui- Wing Tam, The Wall Street Journal, 8 May, 2007.


2 Socialtext Enterprise Microblogging White Paper, Ross Mayfi eld, updated September 2009, www.socialtext.com/ offers/images/Microblogging_whitepa- per.pdf.


3 Although Ohno didn’t state explicitly that these are the only wastes to be eliminated, most people consider them to be the ‘classic’ wastes to be avoided: (1) overproduction; (2) waiting; (3) transporting; (4) over-processing; (5) unnecessary inventory; (6) unnecessary motion; and (7) defects. Many people add an eighth waste: unused employee creativity.


4 Standard work is the safest, highest quality and most effi cient way known to perform a particular process or task.


5 Neatness Counts at Kyocera and at Others in the 5S Club, by Julie Jargon, The Wall Street Journal, 27 October, 2008.


6 All data is from the presentation Break- throughs in Reducing Nurse Documenta- tion Time, at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 22nd Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care, 7 December, 2010.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dan Markovitz is the President of TimeBack Management and the author of A Factory of One (Productivity Press, December 2011). Follow him on his blog at www. timebackmanagement. com or on Twitter at @timeback.


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