Before preparing this article, I experienced an example that shows how important 5S applications are. I clearly saw how much time, and therefore money, can be gained with very simple applications. Of course, it is also of great importance that people have been trained. Although 5S is fundamentally very easy to understand, it is disrupted because applications are ignored, either because employees often take a "that will not work here" approach, or because management relies on stopgap solutions.

Anyway, let us move on to our example...

In the maintenance department of every company there is a box where bolts, washers, and similar items are kept. This box is generally something like this:

Think of the time spent searching for a screw here. What kind of relationship can there be between the cost of a screw and the cost of the time spent finding it? Naturally, the cost of searching will be several times the cost of the screw. The machine that is waiting during this time, the loss of production, the dissatisfaction that will arise at the customer because of it, and costs such as holding inventory by citing these delays, reach a scale that cannot be ignored.

What Can We Do!

In fact, the most important application we can carry out is simply to speed up 5S work. You will see that many jobs speed up in this way and that a sense of relief appears inside the operation. The most important point you need to pay attention to is that you have to show, prove, and even do together "how much importance management gives to 5S." Otherwise a sense of discipline will not form among the employees either, and the work that is done will again become stopgap work.