Lean - The Organised Office
You work in the office to do something useful for our customers and you do that work in a standard way. When you organise the office, you are trying to make it easier to do work.
The way the office is organised should be the same wherever the same task is worked. Just like you have one best current way of doing the work, there is one best way of organising the workspace.
The Five Step Program
- Sort out what you need to do the work and get rid of the rest
- Set in order what you need to do the work
- Shine the workplace
- Standardise the organised office
- Sustain the improvements made
These five stages are often known as 5S and are actually derived from 5 Japanese words that begin with “S”.
You start with Sort.
This is a ruthless review of everything you have in the office; if you need it to get the job done it stays and everything else you get rid of.
Once you have got rid of everything you don’t need, Set in order becomes a lot easier – there is less to put away so there is less to do.
Set in order can be summarised as “a place for everything and everything in it’s place”.
Shine the workplace means cleaning the workplace.
This is much more than keeping things clean so that the office is a pleasant place to work. The act of cleaning will also highlight and reduce problems that might hinder the workflow –think of cleaning as an inspection of the workplace.
Standardise means establishing the changes you have made as the norm. Having done all the hard work removing unnecessary stuff from the office, it would be a tragedy if 6 months later the office was again clogged up with useless clutter.
Sustain is the final and most important of the 5S’s.
There are 2 parts to the Sustain stage.
Firstly you will probably need a regular audit of the important elements of the organised office
You can then set a target for improvement. This will encourage people in the office to look for better ways of organising things and in this way, ideas that make things better become the new standard to be maintained.
In an Organised Office:-
- you always know where things are
- you only have what you need to do the job
- stuff is kept in the best location to get the job done well
- you can tell if something is missing or out of place
- you can see where work is held up or running out
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