5S is a tool to declutter, get organized, work more efficiently and stay that way. It is a simple tool that yields immediate and visible benefit and gains buy in from the team whether that be in the factory, the office or some other function.

5S has been the starting point for many organisations on the lean journey as it helps practice the basics of identifying waste, standardising work practices and making improvements - while achieving runs on the board. But you do need to do all 5 of them to ensure sustained improvements.

The LeanSkills program includes a ‘5S intensive’ which shows how to identify, plan, apply and continually improve your 5S projects. See the Seminar Program page for more information.

Many enterprises are investing in green improvements, or planning to, to improve their sustainability. With the imminent introduction of carbon trading and the social pressure to improve corporate citizenship by reducing the impact on the environment and climate change, all businesses will have to take stock of their environmental impact and carbon footprint.

Effective green activities can range from inexpensive behaviour improvements, such as reducing energy use by turning off lights that are not needed, through to technological research and development to achieve better efficiency. Lean is a structured system for identifying waste and improving efficiency – so it provides a tailor-made set of concepts and tools for going green.

You can use the Lean tools ‘5S’ and ‘Kaizen blitz’ in short, sharp projects to get rid of unused items and reduce consumption of energy/materials. But you can also ensure you get sustained improvements across productivity KPIs, Operational Equipment Efficiency, product improvements and efficient work systems using tools such as Value Stream Mapping, Kaizen, Theory of Constraints and process re-engineering.

Value stream mapping (also called value chain mapping) is a powerful tool to allow you to identify all the steps in your process and determine how much value, and how much waste (muda) it is adding to your product.

Looking at the ’seven deadly wastes’ improves your capacity to deliver what your customer values and is prepared to pay for with less investment in things which the customer does not value. This allows you to trim price, increase margins or both!

The LeanSkills intensive will give you the skills to identify what really goes on and how much it is really costing.

Change is all around us and indeed is being forced on us. Kaizen is about ‘good change’ and is something we need to implement in order to adapt, survive and even thrive in the current climate. Don’t just react to change. Drive change to improve your business.

Kaizen is often translated as meaning continuous improvement and this may mean having the ‘shop floor’ come up with and implement small, seemingly inconsequential good changes each day, every day.

But even a 0.1% improvement every day is over 20% a year. And it is compound!

Where do you get it?

How do you do it?

Often howver, continuous improvement won’t break the intractable problems. For these you need breakthrough improvement (often called kaizen blitz) – a three day to one week intensive program to deliver that step change to solve that intractable problem.

How do you set it up?

How do you run it?