5S for the Office: Organizing the Workplace to Eliminate Waste

Although office and administrative activities are usually 60% of the production costs in most manufacturing organizations, these areas often get excluded during Lean initiatives. To achieve Lean, office activities must fully support shop floor manufacturing operations to eliminate waste. The adoption of 5S throughout all office and administrative functions is the first step to increase efficiency.

In 5S for the Office: Organizing the Workplace to Eliminate Waste, Tom Fabrizio and Don Tapping bring the concepts of the 5S System -- effective tools for the elimination of waste on the shop floor -- into the office environment. The activities at the heart of 5S for the Office (organizing, ordering, cleaning, standardizing, and sustaining all of these) are completely logical. They are the basic rules for managing any effective workplace. However, it is the systematic method with which the 5S system approaches these activities that makes it unique.

This book is a blueprint for building a Lean foundation for your office, and:

• Provides detailed step-by-step implementation on how to apply 5S to your office activities.
• Includes forms, worksheets, and photos that will allow you to "see" the value of 5S, thereby increasing sustained support of the implementation.
• Can be used as a training and implementation manual.

Readers of this book can immediately apply the concepts of 5S to their office and administrative activities, resulting in the elimination of waste, reduced production costs, and increased profits.

About the Authors

Tom Fabrizio has been implementing just-in-time systems for over twenty years in a wide range of industries, including automotive, aerospace, plastic molding and extrusion, food processing, pharmaceutical, and in hospitals and health clinics.

Early in his career, Tom served as a trainer/consultant at Productivity Inc., where he worked closely with Dr. Shigeo Shingo (co-architect of TPS) and Dr. Ryuji Fukuda (Sumitomo)—leading experts in manufacturing improvement—and with TPM experts from the Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance.

Later, when Tom took over as Director of Product Development at Productivity Inc., he was responsible for creating and customizing workshops, simulations, video packages, and other learning systems. Tom was principal developer on Ford s Lean Metric System and co-authored Productivity s highly acclaimed Operator Series, which continues to be a bestseller.

After leaving Productivity in the mid-1990s, Tom co-founded the Healthcare Coalition, whose purpose it was to implement lean in the medical industry. He returned to manufacturing when he started Lean Manufacturing Tools, whose current and past clients include Ford Motor Company, Colgate Palmolive, Lee Blake Precision Machining, Melling Engine Parts, Hedstrom Corporation, Georgia Pacific, Mack Truck, MidAmerican Products, Eaton Aeroquip, Stanley Tool/Hydraulics, Dana Cancer/Boston, St. Charles Medical Center, Blue Cross-Blue Shield/Mass., Northrup Grumman Corporation, and Gleason Cutting Tools.

Tom holds an engineering degree from Tufts University, a Master s Degree in Education from Northeastern University, and a Law Degree from the New England School of Law. He is an adjunct professor at Baker College (Michigan) and managing editor for the Running Lean Digest, a newsletter published by the National Association of Job Shops. Tom teaches a full curriculum in Lean Manufacturing. Notwithstanding his academic credentials, Tom s greatest passion is frontline change, including shopfloor and office transformation.

Don Tapping has worked over twenty-five years to eliminate waste and improve bottomline results. Don authored the best-selling book Value Stream Management for the Lean Office (Productivity Press, 2003), Who Hollered Fore?, and numerous other books on business performance—setting the bar for administrative lean improvements. Numerous organizations have benefited from his ability to design step-by-step implementation methodologies for identifying processes that require improvement and then introducing proactive steps to improve or redesign them, thereby reducing costs, boosting performance, and increasing customer (patient) satisfaction. Don has a B.A. from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame.