Six Sigma: The 5S Tool

Sort.

• The first step is to go through all equipment and materials and determine what must be retained at the worksite. Only essential tools, aids, equipment, and so on are allowed to remain. When you find something that doesn’t belong, return it to the correct person or department or simply get rid of it. Put a red tag on these items and get proper authorization before scrapping, selling, or recycling them

Straighten.

• After Step 1, all you have left at the worksite are essentials. You must now give each of these a single, proper place. You’ve heard the saying, "A place for everything, and everything in its place." That’s exactly what we’re talking about. Be creative in establishing places for things so that returning an item to where it belongs is natural or easy.
• It’s like creating a "shadow board" for tools, with a silhouette for each tool that makes knowing where to put the tool back a cinch. In that way, anyone working in the area can find what they need and know where to put it when they’re done so that it’s ready for its next use. And if an essential tool is absent, that fact is immediately apparent.

Scrub.

• To help maintain the order you’ve created, thoroughly clean everything remaining at the worksite. The time and money spent on polishing or repainting, if needed, will be returned many-fold in more-positive employee attitudes and greater productivity, an increased ability to detect equipment problems, fewer contamination and defects, and improved safety.

Standardize.

• Where possible, make worksites consistent. All workstations for a particular job should be identical so that someone from another worksite can immediately step in and productively run the process if necessary. Think of the value business travel hotels add by standardizing the layout, the furniture, and other amenities across all their locations. That fosters a familiar environment for their guests and increases their guests’ productivity (not to mention the hotel staff’s).

Sustain.

• This final step means to put a schedule and system in place for maintaining and refreshing the 5S-ed worksite. The actions of 5S are everyone’s job, not just the janitor’s or cleaning crew’s.

Attribute Agreement Analysis

• Every time someone makes a decision – such as, "Is this the right candidate?" – it is critical that the decision-maker would select the same choice again and that others would reach the same conclusion. Attribute agreement analysis measures whether or not several people making a judgment or assessment of the same item would have a high level of agreement among themselves.
• Benefits

• Helps to characterize the quality of the data
• Determines the area of non-agreement
• Helps in calibrating appraisers, judges, or assessors for a higher level of agreement
• Easy to analyze with statistical software or a specialized worksheet

• How to Use

• Step 1. Set-up a structured study where a number of items will be assessed more than once by more than one assessor. Have the items judged by an expert, which will be referred to as the "standard" (can be one person or a panel – see table below).
• Step 2. Conduct the assessment with the assessors in a blind environment. They do not know when they are evaluating the same items and they do not know what the other assessors are doing.
• Step 3. Enter the data in a statistical software package or an Excel spreadsheet already set up to analyze this type of data (built-in formula).
• Step 4. Analyze the results: Is there good agreement between appraisers? Each appraiser vs. the standard? All appraisers vs. the standard?
• Step 5. Draw your conclusions and decide on the course of actions needed if the level of agreement is below a set threshold. Usually> 80 percent is considered to be a good level of agreement.

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