What Is The "Sort" Of Lean Manufacturing 5S?

By Michael Baker

Lean manufacturing 5S is a part of an overall lean manufacturing initiative. The goal of any production, manufacturing, or any business for that matter, should be to operate as lean as possible. And, one of the areas you can immediately address is the areas of organization and housecleaning. This is what the 5S refers to. So, let's look at exactly what is the "sort" of lean manufacturing 5S.

It is called 5S because it is made of words that all start with an S. Let's look at each one of the individually and see what needs to be done.

Sort - This means exactly what it says. You take a certain area you will be working on, and you decide what equipment and tools you will need to do the job. All of the other stuff is extra, and will be disposed of.

The other way to look at this is for you to see what extra tools you need to do the job that the people do not have. This then becomes wasted time when the employees must wait for the tools to arrive, must go looking for them, or worse, end up trying to make the wrong tool work. You need the right tools to do the job right.

Now, before you just dispose of it, you will need to set up a "Red Tag" area. This will be a designated location where you can put questionable equipment that you really are not sure if you will need it or not.

The correct way to do this is to actually tag the equipment, with the old location, and the date it was placed into the area. I would also recommend keeping an inventory list of everything in the area. This will allow you to easily find it again. After 6 months, if the equipment is still in the area, and there has been no use for it, you can then dispose of it.

Once done with this, you should end up with all of the correct tools in the work area to get the job done efficiently. You will also end up with a "Red Tag" area where the old equipment is and will remain until either needed again, or disposed of after 6 months. This is the first step of starting a 5S initiative, and more specifically, what is the sort in lean manufacturing 5S.

Lean Manufacturing Secrets goes into detail about the different techniques and philosophies to implement a lean manufacturing 5S initiative.

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