What is 5S?

The 5S System is a lean manufacturing tool designed to improve efficiency and productivity in your plant by making it more organized and efficient. It removes clutter, cuts down on time your staff look for tools and materials while working, and ensures workplaces are consciously free of hazards.

The focus on Lean manufacturing is to increase the productivity and profitability of a plant by making small incremental improvements that add up to large benefits to a company's bottom-line over time. For example, a 5% improvement in production output would not have a drastic impact on a company's bottom-line. However combined with simultaneous 5% reductions in energy usage, raw materials used, employee injuries, etc etc these small changes would be very impactful over the course of a few quarters or years. 

5S is a specific set of actions that a company can use to start to realize these Lean Manufacturing gains. It's often the first step companies take in moving towards a Lean or continuous improvement focused culture because 5S is simple to organize, execute, and impactful. As a process, 5S is designed so that each step builds on the successes of the previous ones, and the last two steps of 5S ensure the benefits of 5S are maintained over the long term. 

The term 5S comes from the five steps of the process, which are named with words that begin with the letter S in the original Japanese. In English you could also call them sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain.