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nformation 5S
By Dan Markovitz. llison is an anaesthesiologist at a major hospital in New
York. Real estate prices being what they are in the country's most expensive city, her office is only slightly bigger than a broom closet.
Every horizontal surface of
Allison's office (except for her chair) is covered - no, buried
- in paper: printed-out emails, regular mail, departmental memos, receipts from the last conference she attended, a decade's worth of professional journals...well, you get the idea. The place is a monument to the paper products industry.
Now, given that Allison does her clinical work in the operating room and doesn't see patients in her office, you might think that the mess is without consequence. After all, it only affects her, not the surgeons or the patients.
Moreover, it only interferes with the administrative aspects of her job, not critical patient care issues.
But you'd be wrong.
Allison's hospital is also a teaching hospital, which means that she's expected to write grants to bring in funds for academic research and she's supposed to publish her findings. Want to guess how many

A

papers Allison has published in the past two years? Zero.
She justifies her lack of academic productivity by explaining that her clinical responsibilities are so onerous that she has no time to find available grants and apply for them. To be fair, she does work a long day and she doesn't get as much academic time as she'd like. But when you watch her for a while, you see that's not the whole story.

Paper shuffling
It turns out that on days
Allison works in her office, she's awfully busy. She spends time moving paper from the left side of the desk to the right side. She spends time looking for articles and print-outs. She spends time looking for basic office supplies. She spends time searching for and printing out journal articles that she's already printed out - two or three times before. She even spends time feeling bad about herself, embarrassed by her office's appearance and struggling to focus on her projects for the day.
Allison isn't alone, even if her story is dramatic. The
Wall Street Journal reported in 2007 that Chevron was investing tens of millions

of dollars in an IT system upgrade because employees were spending between oneand-a-half to three days per month just searching for the information they needed to do their jobs'. Studies by the
Delphi Group and the Butler
Group found that employees spend one quarter of their time looking for information and estimated that searching accounted for 10% of labour costs. Independent internal studies at Intel and Cisco found that their employees spend one day per week searching for information^
Taiichi Ohno, the father of lean production at Toyota, is famous for his 'seven wastes'' and although he never talked about the waste of 'looking for', surely he would see that as one of the causes of unnecessary waiting which is one of the seven wastes.
Certainly, he would classify the shuffling of piles of paper and the continual sorting and re-sorting of email by sender/ date/attachment as wasted motion. Effect of chaos
In a manufacturing setting with a conveyer belt, the cost of these wastes is generally more obvious: workers struggle to find the right

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Efficiency

To be sure, applying 5S yields time savings fram not having to search for information, but the more significant benefit comes from surfacing abnormalities and waste in processes so they can be fixed wrench before the piece moves past them or people in an assembly area stand around waiting for a part to arrive. But the cost is no less significant in an office. If you have to put on a pith helmet, like Howard Carter searching for King Tut, every time you need a document, you're not likely to get a lot done.
In Allison's case, the chaos of her office prevents her from focusing on her academic work, allocating time to it and working efficiently on it.
In Chevron's case, the overwhelming bulk of electronic data reduces productivity by as much as
15%, as measured by the number of days each month lost to searching.
Probably the last thing you wanted or expected when you started reading this article was to be hectored about keeping your office neat and tidy, like your mother yelling at you to pick your socks up off the floor. You've got enough going on without some clown doing a white glove test on your desk.
However, just as organisation and cleanliness on the plant floor are essential elements of a true lean transformation, it's also an essential element of a

lean transformation in the office. As Ohno once said:
"Eliminating waste is not the problem. Identifying it is."

Your work is invisible
Knowledge workers face a daunting task identifying their value-added work.
People working on an assembly line or in an operating room can easily see the work: it's that piece of metal right there on the conveyer belt or the patient lying there on the table.
But for knowledge workers, the job inputs arrive in a variety of formats emails, electronic document attachments, pieces of paper, voicemail, conversations in an office, a hallway or the breakroom - and much of it is intangible.
Also, the incoming flow of work is 'lumpy'. There's often no clear rhythm or cadence to the work as it comes in, so you can't even predict when it will arrive.
Even worse, sometimes it becomes obsolete even before you've had a chance to address it. Just think of the last time 14 budget revisions crossed your desk in the space of three days.
For all these reasons, knowledge workers struggle to keep value visible. It gets buried in waste. Take a tour of

your colleagues' offices - look at the piles of paper on the desk, the hundreds of emails stacked up in their email inboxes, the Post-it notes stuck to any clear horizontal or vertical surface - and you've got a clear image of the waste I'm talking about.

This is where 5S comes in
In some respects, 5S is the foundation of lean. It's not just about 'cleaning your room' or being faster at finding your stapler, with all the triviality that implies.
In reality, the decisions that
5S forces you to make - and the discipline it imposes - is the basis for spotting waste, for creating systems that enable work to flow more efficiently and for helping to clarify 'standard work"* in the complex, highly variable offic environment. To be sure, applying 5S yields time savings from not having to search for information, but the more significant benefit comes from surfacing abnormalities and waste in processes so they can be fixed.
Some people will claim that
5S isn't really important for knowledge workers unless they're sharing an office space or a desk with someone else.
Drawing a parallel to shadow boards for tools.

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they'll say that an engineer or an art director has never lost their computer mouse or stapler on their desk.
Or they'll think of the inane 5S policies that Kyocera
Corporation has in place which, as The Wali Street
Journai reports: "Not only calls for organisation in the workplace, but aesthetic uniformity. Sweaters can't hang on the backs of chairs, personal items can't be stowed

Efficiency

beneath desks and the only decorations allowed on cabinets are official company plaques or certificates."^
But that's not what
I'm talking about. 5S for knowledge workers means
5S for the information you manage, not rules about where you can hang your sweater. Individual information 5S
It's easy to picture 5S in a manufacturing setting: clean machines, tape outlines around equipment, shadow boards for tools, a garbage-free floor etc.
In some respects 5S for manufacturing is easy because the work at each station is done exactly the same way, every time, by each person.
It's easy to define the 'right' set up and layout.
But what does 5S look like in an office? Knowledge workers do dozens of different types of jobs each day - reading and writing emails, preparing spreadsheets, analysing large budget binders, calling customers. Moreover, each person does it a bit differently
- there's no 'right' way to prepare a sales presentation.
How can you bring 5S to a fundamentally variable environment? Information 5S in an office frees you from the waste of looking for the things you need. Those things are both the tools of your trade - the computer, a stapler, pens, printer paper etc - along with the information you're working on - a budget, the draft of a speech, a new aurchasing policy.
A good 5S system makes it fast and easy to access those
¡jngs so you can do the srtant work you're being said to do. But that's just the eginning. liri (sort) means aking decisions about

each individual piece of information that has accumulated over time emails, files, reports, journals, presentations, links to websites etc. Whether you choose to actually use it for a project this week, move it to a file for future reference or toss it, the simple act of deciding what to do with each item can reveal systemic (or personal) problems by forcing you to assess how you work.
For example, if you're a medical assistant, a sloppy pile of patient charts on your desk might indicate that there's something wrong with the system of retrieving, reviewing, signing and filing essential patient information.
You can also be sure that whatever is wrong with the system will lead to lost charts, missing information and wasted time in looking for it.
Notice, though, that the charts wouldn't be visible without cleaning up the information flotsam and jetsam that wash up on your desk. Seiton (set in order) ensures that critical information can be found quickly and easily.
This is the wisdom behind a surgeon's instrument tray being laid out precisely the same way every time and a chef's mise-en-place being set up and ready. When there's an emergency or at 8pm on a Saturday night with every table full, neither the surgeon nor the chef can afford the time to hunt for something in a panic.
But even if you don't work in an operating room or run a restaurant kitchen, what happens when you or your boss go on holiday?
If activity slows down or grinds to a halt because the necessary information can't be found, there's a real problem with the system: Daily work should flow in your absence as smoothly as if you were there.

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The concept of preventative maintenance embedded within seiso (shine) is another aspect of 5S that elevates it above simple desktop or office organisation. Regular attention to the information coming into your office ensures that you'll know if projects are in danger of falling behind schedule or if invoices are at risk of not being paid on time - and enables you to act before the situation becomes critical.
Seiketsu (standardise) demands the development of a precise routine for the most easily controlled element in a chaotic environment cleaning and organising a workspace. At first blush, this may seem unnecessarily anal - I mean, do you really need a system for cleaning out your email inbox and processing the papers that piled up during your holiday? Nevertheless, there's wisdom in the concept.
Having a system for processing and cleaning up all the information in your office means that you'll get through the activity faster and with a lower risk of missing something important. The deeper value of developing a system for a task like 5S, however, is that it acts as a springboard for the development of standard work for other areas of your job. Allison did embark on a rigorous 5S programme, throwing out the stuff that she didn't need and organising her paper and electronic files according to frequency of use.
This simple change provided her with the ability to actually see what needed her attention and to stay focused on it.
As a result, she reduced the cognitive distractions that kept her from really focusing on her writing. 'Shining' her work provided her a regular status update on her research

paper and helped define a plan for her to get the work done. Finally, standardising her
5S activities helped her to develop the discipline to do her academic research more frequently instead of allowing it to sink, literally and metaphorically, below the piles of trash in her office, or get pushed aside by other competing commitments.
To be sure, the rigour of
5S isn't a panacea for all her problems, but she now regularly spends two to three hours per week on her research and is hoping to publish a paper before the end of the year.

Systemic information 5S
As I mentioned earlier, 5S applies to both physical and electronic information and, so far, I've been talking about using it for personal information management.
But applying it to the information flows within an organisation is perhaps an even more powerful use of the tool.
Think of the reports that you produce or read: how many of them show similar or even identical information? How many of those reports do you really need? I know of one IT department that produced more than 350 reports per month for the company's managers and executives.
As part of a 5S initiative, they analysed all the reports, spoke to their customers (ie the executives) and eliminated the obsolete reports, the redundant reports and the non-user friendly reports. They reduced the volume to 37.
Similarly, a nursing team at
Covenant Health System in
Lubbock, Texas took the 5S chainsaw to the overwhelming paperwork burden that threatened to crush them daily. Before they deployed
5S, nurses spent an average of

6.1 hours per 12-hour shift on documentation. Collectively, they handled over 2.2 million forms each year. Even worse, documentation errors often weren't detected for three to five weeks after patient dismissal. A comprehensive 5S initiative involved simplifying, combining and standardising forms, leading to a 40% reduction in paperwork and a
48% reduction in time spent filling out documentation*".
Each nurse recaptured three hours per shift to spend with patients - the activity that they not only love, but which also creates the real value for the patients/customers.
In these two examples, the
5S principles of seiri (sort) and seiton (set in order) were used to reduce systemic waste
- of time, effort and energy
- and helped workers spend more time doing something important for customers.
This broader application of 5S to the management of information is just as important in reducing waste as the individual application, but has greater impact on both individual and group productivity. 1
1

References
1 Cutting Files Down to Size, by PuiWlng Tarn, The Wall Street Journal, 8
May, 2007.
2 Socialtext Enterpiise Micmblogging
White Paper, Ross Mayfield, updated
September 2009, www.socialtext.com/ offers/lmages/Microblogging_whitepaperpdf. 3 Although Ohno didn't state explicitly that these are the only wastes to be eliminated, most people consider them to be the 'classic' wastes to be avoided:
( 1 ) overproduction; (2) waiting; (3) transporting; (4) ovi?r-processing; (5) unnecessary inventory; (6) unnecessary motion; and (7) defects. Many people add an eighth waste; unused employee creativity. 4 Standard work is the safest, highest quality and most efficient way known to perform a particular process or task.
5 Neatness Counts c)f Kyocera and at
Others in the 5S Club, by Julie Jargon,
The Wall Street Journal, 27 October,
2008,
5 All data is from the presentation Breakthroughs in Reducing Nurse Documentation Time, at the Institute for Healthcare
Improvement's 22nd Annual National
Forum on Ouality Improvement in Health
Care, 7 December, ;'O1O.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Markovitz is the
President of TimeBack
Management and the

author of A Factory of
Remember, it's a means to an end
Let's be honest: there's something about 5S and organisation in general that feels trivial at best and remedial at worst. But that's only because you're thinking about the process and not the objective.
What you're really trying to do here is make it easier to spot abnormalities and waste, allowing you to focus on creating value for your customers. From this perspective, you can view 5S as a fundamental building block, rather than remediation: it's the foundation of the cathedral of value that you're erecting.

One (Productivity Press,
December 2011). Follow him on his blog at www. timebackmanagement, com or on Twitter at
@timeback.

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