Clean up

If anyone tells you a sure-fire way of installing the '5S' methodology successfully, make an excuse and leave. All that's certain is that what works in one company doesn't work elsewhere. Though 5S is often seen as a trigger for culture change, it can falter even in a brilliant culture. John Wright says other companies would "give anything" to have the culture at 100 year old steel-cabinet maker Ritherdon. Wright, works director of its Darwen, Lancs, site says Ritherdon has installed mezzanine floors, repainted the building to make it more pleasant and lighter to work in, and invested in new equipment, including a £500,000 Trumpf punch press installed in 2005. And the workforce has responded. Ritherdon never needs external help even for building mezzanines or, as needed to put the Trumpf in, knocking down and rebuilding brickwork. But though Ritherdon has improved since the early 90s, Wright says, "we realised three to four years ago [that] we weren't moving on. We'd improve working practices round a particular machine and it wasn't being maintained. We'd have blitzes of cleaning and tidying up but if the work area doesn't stay like that you are no better off." Wright and production supervisor Nigel Ormerod realised that "there had to be some formal structure" if they were going to move to continuous improvement (CI). They agreed with Bill Tiplady of Manchester-based organisation The Manufacturing Institute (TMI) that 5S would be a stepping stone to instilling the lean habit. Once factory life had settled after 18 months of Trumpf-installation turmoil, says Wright, 5S "made us far more aware of the amount of rubbish on the shopfloor". Indeed, 5S became the norm and operators were carrying out periodic 5S audits "to identify issues that need keeping on top of." Now the shopfloor is constantly on the lookout for ways of speeding up what they do and making it more efficient, says Wright. Machinery has been moved and doorways widened to make the factory run more smoothly: "They are looking critically at any challenges they have and looking at ways of overcoming them. It really does work and it involves no supervision time whatever." Wright agrees that sustaining it is the real challenge, but 5S provides the formal structure that gives its users a benchmark by which they can get together and keep tabs on how well they are doing. Now Ritherdon is ready to move on to batch size reduction and other facets of lean thinking, says Wright. Discipline Ritherdon's example appears to support MCP Management Consultants' Phil Tugwell's view that, "5S is the fundamental building block of any CI programme. It's not about the cleaning and tidying. It's about the discipline that goes with it. Without that you're not going to achieve any of the other continuous improvements." But he cautions: "You have to have something in place that makes it sustainable." That something, he suggests, is "the management team walking the floor". Andy Spooner of Bath-based manufacturing consultancy Suiko agrees. Business and management leaders have to demonstrate through the way they behave every minute of the day that 'this is important'. Both might have been thinking of Huco Dynatork, which employs 65 to make small precision mechanical rigid and flexible couplings in Hertford. There, the offices as well as the shopfloor have adopted 5S. When the white collar people are doing it, that's one big step towards motivating the whole site. Another is that normal work stopped in each department for the three or five days of each 5S training course. When management stops everything, the workers are listening. Huco is moving to the lean techniques practised by parent Altra of Quincy, Massachusetts, USA. The Altra Business System (ABS) will provide more flow and continuity, says director of manufacturing Julian Green. Huco is adopting kanban systems to pull orders for wildly-varying quantities of 25,000 to 30,000 different products through the factory. When Altra bought Huco in February 2006 Altra chief executive Michael Oppenheimer came to Hertford to explain that Huco would be adopting the lean-based ABS. "People knew from the beginning that they meant business," says Green. "Everyone took ownership of their areas, which they never had before." They began to be quite competitive about how clean their areas were. Green adds that "5S was a good stepping stone to getting people used to the concepts of lean manufacturing", and prepared them for value stream mapping, set-up reduction and total productive maintenance: "Without 5S you haven't installed the discipline." You can't, for example, do quick set-ups until the factory is clean and tidy, and tools and other items are in a secure place. Strong foundations Huco and Ritherdon installed 5S on already-strong foundations. Spooner has strong reservations about whether others are ready even for the 'first step' to lean that 5S is said to represent. He can't remember when Suiko last ran its 5S training module. In his view, 5S has to work with other programmes, particularly the use of KPIs. Some industries, like food, would do well to get their existing systems working before they started adding anything else: "We are still going into businesses where they are looking at going lean but they haven't got the operational basics in place." He means whether the right players are on the pitch, whether they've got the organisational structure to enable people to own their areas, and for there to be transparency about what they are expected to do. "Too often the teams don't know how they are being measured or what they are being measured against." Very often, no-one really knows who has responsibility for the machinery in their area - is it the maintenance crew or the operators? - or even where their area ends and another begins. Some of these lessons have been learnt at Heimbach UK. It weaves the polymer mesh used to turn paper pulp into paper. With help from TMI, this Wythenshawe, Manchester, firm adopted 5S a few years ago as a lean first step. As part of the exercise, says Heimbach's lean co-ordinator Kevin Grimshaw, Heimbach used a questionnaire with such questions as 'have you removed all broken machines from your department?'. But it was unclear who was responsible for some assets. All assets have now been assigned a designated owner. Heimbach's example also shows that keeping a 5S programme afloat needs constant attention. The 5S results were "fantastic" for the first two years, says Grimshaw - so good, in fact, that management transferred lean full-timer Grimshaw back to his former job as a quality examiner. A mistake. The 5S initiative faltered on the shopfloor and never took off in the offices. For the last couple of years, says Grimshaw, shopfloor 5S has only been kept alive "by kicking people's bums." As a result, the shopfloor began to look untidy again. Heimbach's management was keen to reinstate 5S because it wanted to move on to TPM and SMED (single-minute exchanges of die) and didn't believe it could do that without 5S's underpinning. At the beginning of this year, management resinstated both Grimshaw and the 5S programme, this time with an extra 'S' - for 'safety'. An important incentive is that Heimbach will now include 6S with productivity, quality, and time and attendance in the year's targets for both departmental and group bonuses. 5S is not simple, says Spooner. There's a lot to it, he says, and it's not easy to concentrate on its installation in companies already stripped to the bone and under pressure to deliver products: "Right now if people are starting out, the pressure of 'we need it yesterday' is massive." Businesses where there's a lot of fire-fighting are all too likely to let 5S slide as soon as the first rush order comes in. If the pressure is even greater, 5S is even more vulnerable. Anson Packaging's Sutton, Cambs, site won a Best Factory Award in 2003 on its 5S strengths. The company made 5S the centrepiece of a company-wide campaign to make CI a way of life. Now, "things have moved on," says Trevor Wilkin, who ran the programme. Though sales are rising and the business continues to grow, he says, the management has been forced to make a tight 90-degree turn from operational excellence to an obsession with huge capital investment and innovation in materials and processes. The reason is climate change. Anson makes the skin-thin polymer trays for packaging chocolates and biscuits. All its technology has been based on the 75 tonnes of PVC-based products it makes weekly. Now its customers want bio-degradable alternatives. PVC in Anson, says Wilkin, "could be gone within 12 months." If that happens, Anson's 20 years of PVC-processing knowledge will count for nothing. Anson retains "an interest" in overall equipment efficiency (OEE), says Wilkin, and uses standard operating procedures to maintain best practice. But none of this looms as large as it did. If Anson had taken the view "that 'we've been doing this for 20 years, and that we can improve by using a few basic tools and doing what we do but better,' we'd have disappeared." Even Anson's solid management commitment to 5S wasn't enough. In the end, some managements believe they have to decide whether they are there to run 5S or to deliver shareholder value. For them, it isn't certain that 5S is one way to deliver just that. And who's to say they're wrong? "If you can't assess tangible benefits from 5S you shouldn't be doing it," says Spooner, but adds: "To realise tangible benefits from 5S is quite difficult." Managers have to do two things, he says: "They need to get the practices in place and they need to deliver the goods." If there's not a connection between those then the practices won't help. Chris Ellins goes further. Unscrupulous consultants are plying 5S as "as a wonder drug", he says. Ellins should know. His CV ranges across sharp-end management in the automotive, aerospace, food, pharmaceutical and packaging industries. Now himself managing director of a consultancy, Total Flow, he insists that, "as a rule, 5S is much misunderstood. It is often badly applied and badly taught." For Ellins the real value of 5S is not as a means to improve housekeeping but as an enabler to what he calls production system design's 'golden triangle': standard work, standard management and visual management. These, he says, "are the mechanism by which all work is done, abnormalities identified and controlled, and improvement needs identified and implemented." Implementing 5S in isolation "is pretty useless", says Ellins, "and it soon falls into disrepair as work teams lose sight of the value of the standards they have created." He suggests: "If you are in a business that has struggled to deploy 5S successfully, ask yourself what part of the golden triangle is missing..."