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"Competent (individuals) in every position, from top management to the humblest worker, know all that there is to know about their work except how to improve it. Help toward improvement can only come from outside knowledge." - W. Edwards Deming

The Cost of Uncontrolled Work

February 2011

By Douglas C. Wood
Is every job at your organization different, or are there areas of work that repeat the same tasks over and over? If so, then standard work will improve consistency, please customers, and let managers see quickly when things are not going well.

Major expenses

If every person is doing repetitious work that is not standardized, then half of their time is waste. How can this be? Think of it this way: 15% of the time is spent in new work planning, 20% of the outcomes are not good enough for the customer, and 15% of the time is redoing the work. This is 50%! Take 50% of your fully burdened personnel costs and see what it costs you: with 50 people, this can reach $1.2 million a year. (Add customer dissatisfaction, and the costs/ lost revenue really add up.)

You depend on a good result all the time, so standard work is needed. Managers cannot be everywhere, and a simple method is needed that everyone can use to keep standard work going.

Five S (or Six S if safety is included) is the Lean tool that sets up a path to standard work. By applying this tool, your work teams can build standard work as easily as they build disorganized work.

Five S is an early step in Lean, but there can be resistance. You are taking away things people have depended on to help them feel secure. Rushing into Five S usually results in stumbling, so taking a class in Five S will help avoid some of the more common pitfalls.

Here are the main steps to Five S:

Sort: Separate what is needed in the work area from what is not; eliminate the latter
Set-in-order: Organize what remains, a place for everything and everything in its place
Shine (and inspect): Clean and inspect, machines and total environment
Standardize: Make work consistent, for cleaning, inspection, and safety activities
Sustain : Keep it up, make 5S a way of life, a series of habitual tasks

The steps should be applied to core work, not just to the surface appearances. For example, if you are doing this in an office, Five S is more than where people put their paper clips. If email is a major portion of everyone’s work, then everyone’s email folders and their use of email needs to be part of the Five S discipline.

The result is having everything ware you need it, and not having excess junk in the way of doing the work. The strongest intangible benefit of Five S is that a clean and orderly workplace makes everyone feel better.

How to learn more

We offer a three hour webinar on Lean Five S, including an exercise, audit form, and reporting template. You can find this instructor-led course here: DC Wood Course Registrations

We offer expert support for any stage of implementation of a quality cost measure. To reach us:
DC Wood Consulting, LLC
13817 Bradshaw, Suite B
Overland Park, Kansas USA 66221
E mail: click here
Phone: (913) 669-4173
Fax: (913) 273-1611