5S: how to make it become culture?

Some day, Ministry of manpower and transmigration come to visit one of factories. This is not the first time government officer or foreign officer come to visit this factory. As usual, everybody come to do preparation about the security, agenda as well as the cleaning of area that the minister will be passed through. And management instructed to all employee to start cleaning the machine since the minister will visit and pass through the machine area. And the managers ask the shop-floor to clean their area and machine.

And the big day came. The minister came and gave the speech and visited the factory area. The big ‘baligo’ was setup to welcome and many journalist follow the minister and the video was prepared so it could be shown on TV. Everybody was happy and what the purpose of this visit is achieved. They could achieve that success because they had experience and work hard to create the condition that suitable to show for outsider as an image of the company.

5S is not implemented well here. To solve the problem, just clean the specific area and claim that the implementation of 5S of their area is running good. They just requested shop-floor people to do extra job to clean the machine area where in the normal time they did not monitor about the cleanness of the area.

The lack of standard or even there was no standard make the situation become worse. The increasing the defect problems because of contaminating of the product with foreign material become dominant. They were still not aware about that condition and blame others for the quality problem. Unplanned breakdown become common because some components weren’t monitored well which were the key components.

They had an 5S audit, but the result of an audit was not clear. The quality of the auditor was questionable as well as the audit criteria. There was no specific goal for this audit.

The 5S need implementation need to reprogrammed again. And it should be soon. How is the condition after implement and refreshing 5S, see more in the next post.