GM504 Unit 6 5S Decay Seminar Reflection Example

Faded Lanes and Empty Shadow Boards: A Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Why a 5S Event Did Not Last

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM504: Organizational Excellence and Change

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Ridgeway Building Supply, its yard and the classmates are composite; the studies cited are real.

The Case I Presented

Three years ago Ridgeway hired a consultant to run a one-week 5S event in the main yard. The five steps, sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain, were introduced in a day of training and four days of work. Crews red-tagged 140 items that had not been used in a year and removed most of them. They painted staging lanes on the yard floor, hung shadow boards with outlined tools at every workstation and adopted a monthly audit sheet with scores posted in the break room.

Fourteen months later, the audits had stopped. Today the lanes are faded and ignored, about half the shadow boards are missing tools and several red-tagged items have returned to the yard.

My Explanation Going In

My notes before the seminar said: "The crew never bought in. They saw it as the consultant's project." I believed the fix for our current project, reducing wrong-item deliveries, was to involve the crew more from the start.

The First Rival Explanation

A classmate who runs a hospital supply room asked who owned the audit after the consultant left. The answer, which I had to look up during the session, was that the audit sheet named no owner. The yard lead filled it in for a few months because the consultant had asked him to, then stopped when spring volume arrived. Nobody noticed, because nobody above him reviewed the scores.

Nicola Bateman's study of improvement sustainability found that gains decay most often when the follow-up activities that maintain them have no owner and no review, and that the presence of a structured process for sustaining improvement mattered more than the enthusiasm of the original event (Bateman, 2005). That fit our yard exactly. The crew's attitude was not the first thing that failed; the review was.

The Second Rival Explanation

The instructor raised a harder point. She asked what problem 5S had solved for the yard crew. I said it made the yard tidier and tools easier to find. She asked whether either of those had been a problem the crew cared about. The truthful answer was that tools were rarely missing before the event, and the biggest daily frustration in the yard, searching overflow racks for products the system said were in a bin, was untouched by 5S, since the system records stayed wrong.

Nelson Repenning and John Sterman described how improvement programs that add work without relieving the pressures people face tend to be abandoned when workload rises, because the people doing them see effort without benefit (Repenning & Sterman, 2001). From the crew's side, 5S added a monthly audit and the job of keeping lanes clear without making their search for products any shorter.

I had blamed the crew for not caring about an improvement that did not solve any problem they had, and then blamed them again for not maintaining it when nobody was assigned to.

Where I Stood at the End

When the session closed, I no longer held the buy-in explanation as the main cause. I still think engagement matters, but it was the third of three reasons, not the first. Research on how continuous improvement takes hold describes it as a set of routines an organization learns over time, not a single event, which our one-week consultant visit never became (Bessant et al., 2001). The first was that sustainment had no owner. The second was that 5S addressed the yard's appearance rather than its real problem.

What This Means for the Current Project

The same decay is possible in our error-rate project. If we introduce scan-confirmed picking and stock moves, the crew will be asked to do more scanning. That change does relieve their biggest frustration, since accurate bin records would end most overflow searches, which gives it a better chance than 5S had. But it will still fail if nobody owns the weekly location audit after the project lead returns to her regular job. I plan to propose that the control plan name the inventory control lead as owner of location accuracy and the yard operations manager as owner of the correction rate, with a Monday review the owner's manager attends.

What I Cannot Yet Answer

It remains unclear to me how a project lead can tell, at the start, whether the people doing the work will see a change as relieving their burden or adding to it. Asking them helps, but the yard crew might have said 5S was a good idea at the time. I would like to know how experienced practitioners test that before they begin.

References

Bateman, N. (2005). Sustainability: The elusive element of process improvement. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 25(3), 261-276. https://doi.org/10.1108/01443570510581862

Bessant, J., Caffyn, S., & Gallagher, M. (2001). An evolutionary model of continuous improvement behaviour. Technovation, 21(2), 67-77. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166-4972(00)00023-7

Repenning, N. P., & Sterman, J. D. (2001). Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened: Creating and sustaining process improvement. California Management Review, 43(4), 64-88. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166101