Many sites introduce 5S and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) into their production areas, but they are disappointed as improvements are not sustained, especially if more than one shift is involved. To address this issue, this book presents an approach to 5S thinking that assists sites to establish Production Area Based Teams of four to eight members including a designated Production Frontline Leader with effective responsibility for their workplace. Then through an inductive approach of emotive questioning, all Production Area Based Team members are engaged to embrace 5S thinking through an improvement activity called Work Area Management, an enhanced version of 5S and a prerequisite for successful implementation of TPM’s Autonomous Maintenance.

This approach uses a ten-step process and initially focuses on the Work Area to minimise extra work thrown to the Maintenance Department. It involves allocating Focus Points to each team member other than the Production Frontline Leader to ensure involvement and accountability, introducing Compliance Audits for agreed standards to reinforce correct behaviours and Improvement Sheets to ensure agreement between shifts before implementing any changes. This results in a sustained neat work area with a ‘place for everything and everything in its place’ but more importantly a work area where standards are agreed upon and respected across all shifts.

This approach also provides a very solid foundation for going forward with TPM’s Autonomous Maintenance, which includes 5S thinking for the equipment to achieve a failure-free (zero breakdowns), trouble-free (zero quality problems) and safe workplace (zero accidents and incidents).