Hi All,

Since starting my productivity posts I am taking a little more notice of work environments and as I am on the road quite a bit I see many and varied offices that seem to be overlooked in the current improvement strategies that workshops and manufacturing businesses are undertaking. This is unfortunate as the “office” is where all the planning starts and the larger amount of staff the higher the opportunity to save time and money. Just think about the 3 estimators you may have , if you can save them 2 hours per week each , conservatively that’s about $11,000 per annum in wages or conversely the opportunity to organize/estimate/follow up on another 294 hours of jobs each year.

Dont forget that the brand new machine you may have needs to be fed and the quicker and more efficiently you can feed it , the greater the ROI (Return on Investment) !

So , for this post I want to focus on running a 5S program for the office. If you have not heard of 5S before this is a brief description form Wikipedia:

‘5S’ is the name of a workplace organization methodology that uses a list of five Japanese words which are seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and shitsuke. Translated into English, they all start with the letter S and are:

Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, Sustain

The list describes how items are stored and how the new order is maintained. The decision making process usually comes from a dialogue about standardization which builds a clear understanding among employees of how work should be done. It also instills ownership of the process in each employee.

So the first S in the five is

Sort: Clear out unused or rarely used items from the work areas.

If you can , organize a sorting day or part thereof where all office staff, along with a manager do a walk around the office looking at everything asking the question; Whats this for , when was the last time we used it and , are we likely to use it again. This is a very deliberate process because I’m sure you all know that once you are familiar with your environment you can “overlook” certain things in your home and in the office  for years , they are just a fixture!

Use the sort process to throw out unwanted items , anything from old bits of steel used for measurement of a job 3 years ago to a stack of tender documents/drawings for a job you didn’t win !  While doing the rounds you can be tagging items with postits or moving  them into a specific place depending on how they are categorized. EG: Return to Material Rack or Tool drawer, Box up and store in 2008/09 archives, give back to the manager for him to decide on! The goal is to categorize and process.   Once you have done this take a break and reconvene next week for the 2nd “S”.

Be back in 7 days to discuss the second “S”

Save some time and spend it doing something you love!

Tim