The Japan 5S

A. Hi Jehan, Tan: If you follow the links to the Amazon books that are recommended and/or advertised here, you can "look inside" some of them to see if they have a chapter on the history of 5S. I suspect that most do. Then you can see if your university library has that volume or can get it for you. Good luck with it! Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E. RET finishing.com Brick, New Jersey

A. Hi Miguel and forks,

The first reference you can access is by Takashi Osada: The 5S's - Five Keys To A Total Quality Environment. Osada is a founder of the 5S concept for industry use. He is working on TPM thus the book is TPM-oriented. The safety aspect is also included. A good reference as a general guidance, but old.

The next reference is by Hiroyuki Hirano. Hirano is a JIT consultant thus his books are all JIT-oriented. -->
Other books, such as by Monden and Imai, adopted Hirano's reference.

The 5S within Toyota Production System (TPS) is illustrated by Jeffrey Liker: The Toyota Way. First you have to understand that this approach is to assist TPS. Lean Thinking by Womack and Jones also touches on 5S with this perspective.

The origin of 5S is unknown but definitely not by Toyota (see, Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management). The 5S was mainly used at schools for education purpose (but no reference because many books were burnt at war). The first application of 5S in business is for safety purpose. Studies show that 5S reduces incidents but also increases productivity and quality.

There are many How-To books. You can access them easily. However, quality of those books varies. For theses, you should not use them because they are empirical, not suitable for the academic purpose. Get journal articles, such as my studies on 5S. I detailed the historical background of 5S as well.

How effectively can we implement a 5S program? Ask consultants or go to their website. As I mentioned, 5S has multiple perspectives thus you should set the purpose of 5S first. The 5S for organizational excellence is a different story.

I am also writing a PhD thesis about how differently the concept of 5S is understood and applied in the West. It is not about how to implement a 5S program. My study found that 5S is no longer as housekeeping. In Japan, 5S is rather used for organizational development and change, such as to educate workers after M&A is executed.

Hope this comment would help.

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Ed. note: Thanks, Kaoru. Very helpful!

A. I have spent time with various Japanese consultants who are now pushing 70 or are in their 70's, and they point to an origin of the 5S approach in consulting work done by "Nihon Nouritsu Kyoukai," which is currently known in in many countries outside of Japan as the "Japan Management Association."

Although I have heard many stories about the first time certain people that I know heard about 5S as young men working in factories, I have not heard about any one person being its originator. First of all, the first 2 S's are a saying in Japanese: "SEIRI-SEITON" which under normal standards of translation mean simply: "spruce up" or "make everything shipshape." My impression is that posting the words "SEIRI-SEITON" in a workplace was a normal thing to do before they became the first two S's of what we now know as the 5S's. No one person can lay claim to the idea of posting SEIRI-SEITON, just as no one can claim to have thought of posting "ANZEN-DAIICHI" ("Safety First"), another saying one would normally see in an industrial workplace.

Among the stories I have heard, one anecdote is that the Nouritsu Kyoukai Consultants at Toyota (possibly Mr. Shigeo Shingo and others working with him or for him), after having quantified SEIRI by saying that its achievement was in removing items from the workplace, and SEITON by saying that its achievement was in designating fixed locations for items needed in the workplace, felt the need to reinforce the gains made by SEIRI and SEITON activities, and the chose the word SEISO (which means simply: "cleaning") because it fit the first two concepts, and it's alliteration made for a snappy slogan. This seemed to catch on, and the consultants eventually got to 5 S's. In fact, for many years Toyota only spoke of 4S's. Now, there are some companies that insist on 6 and 7 S's. But in any event, I think that the truth is that 5S originated with the Nouritsu Kyoukai Consultants who quantified "SEIRI-SEITON," which had become a trite and sometimes empty phrase, often seen in Japanese factories.