5S and Visual Control

These two basic lean tools can be universally applied in the office, clinic, service operations, or on the manufacturing floor, yielding major performance gains. Our focus goes well beyond housekeeping. The goal is to help your personnel to establish work systems that eliminate waste, build in visibility and operations control, and support autonomous management. The course addresses 5S and visual control from the level of the individual work station to the entire value stream. Hands on exercises, such as transformation of our Browning Bat Factory, build in-depth skills and illustrate a practical implementation process your employees can take to their own workplaces. Manufacturing, health care, and office/transactional versions of this course are available. This course is normally conducted over 11/2 - 2 days, and we strongly recommend integration of a workplace 5S/visual-control project with the course.

This course can be targeted for any audience, including front line personnel, office staff, operations leaders, and professional work teams. Both workstation and system-level exercises are employed and would be selected based on those most relevant to your organization. For example, in manufacturing we typically use our Browning Bat Factory Exercise to illustrate implementation of 5S and visual control at the system level and our Pipe Works Assembly Exercise to illustrate detailed implementation at the individual workstation level. For a health care audience, we might employ our Storage and Kitting exercise that addresses organization of medical supplies, kit structuring, and kit use in a medical procedure.

Students who take this class will learn…

• Effective procedures for sorting necessary from unnecessary materials and conducting red-tag campaigns
• Principles for locating and organizing materials that eliminate wastes of motion and searching while preventing mistakes in process execution.
• Techniques for facilitating continuous cleanup
• How to make 5S systems failsafe and self sustaining
• Visual control implementation at both the process and system level
• Effective use of color coding systems
• Specific visual control system objectives, along with good practices for realizing those objectives.
• How to integrate visual controls in support of lean management practices
• How to structure and deploy auditing systems to enhance and sustain both 5S and visual control in the workplace