Hello. I am Katsuya Yasuda of Yasuda Consulting.

On April 10th, I gave a lecture at Working Group of the Chamber of Commerce in Kagawa Prefecture. The theme is “5S in construction industry”.

Speaking of 5S, its importance is frequently reported in manufacturing industry, but it is one of the most important activities in the construction industry.

One of the reasons is “to eliminate disasters on construction site”. Although the start of 5S is Seiri(Sort) and Seiton(Set In Order), it reduces mistakes (near miss) and there is the effect of reducing injury and death accident. This effect is vital for construction industry because there are more dangerous work than other industries.

However, there are many difficulties to go on 5S in construction industry because each sites are in different places and are put a team by different members from multiple companies. If you are the prime contractor, it is easier to do 5S activities than subcontractors. If you are the subcontractor , you need to get consent from prime contractor.

For these reasons, it is better to start 5S in only your company. For example, in warehouse or in tool box.

I believe that 5S doesn’t contains important elements only in keeping safety but alse other areas.

One of them is improving profitability. We can reduce waste. For example, Searching something doesn’t make any productivity. So we reduce many cases of searching something. And we can avoid to be interrupted a construction by keeping cleanliness of tools and machines.

Another is about human resources (recruitment, colonization, education). The process of ‘visualization’ carried out during 5S activities will lead to standardization of rules. It makes easy for fleshmen to work together with skilled workers.In addition to improving recruitment and retention rates, such efforts will affect for workers to get motivation. You can leave 5S activites to workers. It will lead to raising to workers with aggressiveness and independence.

The lecture was only 1 hour. So I focused on the lecture as knowledge of 5S and using 5S for management.

I am happy if it has become a trigger for awareness and improvement of those who participated.