Continuous improvement within the company - Case study: 5S and visual management

The following study is intended to illustrate the tools of World Class Manufacturing and continuous progress presented in the article "Continuous improvement in the company". . It's a fortunate choice that leads us to visual management, a true pillar of bottom-up management. Our starting point is the workshop, the factory, where the heart of the company beats. But we mustn't forget that the story we're about to tell together is a story that can and must also take place in managers' offices, otherwise the men and women they manage will never adhere to the philosophy that the workplace is a place that is deeply respected, and that everyone is responsible for this positive attitude. So, with a short extract from the article by François Pathy and Roy Billam to discover this essential tool.

"5S and visual management are a set of routines and techniques designed to create workplace organization habits, ensure compliance with standards and encourage a spirit of continuous improvement. 5S coupled with visual management make it easy to discover anomalies and deviations from a desired situation: too much or too little work-in-process, unsatisfactory machine condition, unfinished preventive maintenance interventions, or production drifts in quantity or quality. 5S is a useful, if not indispensable, prelude to the implementation of a world-class production approach. In fact, they are a visible sign of the beginning of a cultural change in the field.

Why is visual management married to 5S? Because it's an integral part of the latter. In fact, visual management is the fourth S. You can't imagine a visual management project without first going through the first three Ss. Why not? For the simple reason that it would be pointless to paint a wall before cleaning it, or to delimit the location of an element while knowing that it is going to change place... The first three S's are the essential preparation for a successful visual management project.

Where does 5S come from? It's a method created in Japan. It starts with clearing ("seiri"), then tidying ("seiton"), cleaning ("seiso"), standardizing ("seiketsu") and finally sustaining ("shitsuke"). Stated in this way, the method seems perfectly logical and applicable to everyone. But this is not the case. People don't use the 5S method, as evidenced by the hundreds of useless or seldom-used objects and tools cluttering up our workplaces. It's the systematic application of the first three Ss and the few basic techniques that make them so effective and clever that will enable us to pave the way for an obvious, more efficient...