5S is often the starting point for companies when trying to implement a continuous improvement culture. It will engage your workers and give them a platform to contribute their ideas for improvement, immediately.

5S is a tool that anyone can adapt and apply to their own work if they are looking for Standardization, Predictability, Increased Visual Communication, and less Variability in their workplace and especially with tasks they repeat over and over. Great 5S is visual and transparent.

However, it’s more of an “on the job” or “at the workplace” tool than an overall business strategy. 5S concerns itself with the nitty-gritty details of a particular workplace or task: the materials, workflow, processes, visualizations, and often, the supply chain of all these.

If you walk onto a construction site and see mess after mess, materials stacked in a hodge-podge, trash here and there – there is a high probability that it’s a poorly run project and likely the schedule is late, the project over budget and the quality is sub-par.

5S will improve upon these things by giving you a structure to follow when addressing repeatable work, thereby allowing you to really consider what is most important to your work.