chapter 6 - Malaysia Productivity Corporation ( MPC)

Box 5.3: Moving Quality Environment (QE)/5S To Lean Management
Quality Environment (QE)/5S philosophy focuses on effective workplace organization and standard
workplace procedures. QE/5S simplifies work environment, reduces waste and non-value added activities
to improve quality, efficiency and safety.
The QE/5S concept involves sort (seiri), set in order (seiton), shine (seiso), standardise (seiketsu) and
sustain (shitsuke).This concept has been introduced and perfected by Toyota in order to make wastes
visible and to eliminate it. This is the basic requirement to establish operational stability and to sustain
continuous improvement initiatives.
QE/5S is one of the foundations in lean management practices. QE/5S and visual management are the
concept which encompasses critical information at the point of needs. It provides the impetus towards
this initiative by ensuring all information remains clearly visible, understood and being adhered to. A
visual workplace minimises time in motion searching, waiting, retrieving and reworking.
What is Lean management?
The core idea of lean management is to maximise customer value while minimising wastes along the
entire value chain. The definition of lean as developed by National Institute of Standard and Technology of
USA is “…a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste through continuous improvement,
flowing the product at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection..”
Lean management is derived mostly from Toyota Production System (TPS). The TPS system focuses on
the entire process of the product flow. It introduces self-monitoring mechanism to ensure quality. The
machines are line-up in the process sequence to smoothen the production flows. The single minute
exchange dies (SMED) was introduced to shorten the set-up time. All these initiatives allowed Toyota to
obtain low cost, high variety, high quality and rapid throughput time to meet customer needs.
The concept of wastes as mentioned above is usually refer as non-value added activities and popularly
known as the seven wastes as listed below. According to Mr.Taiichi Ohno, (co-developer of Toyota
Production System), these wastes accounted for up to 80% of working time where 45% of it is total
waste (*muda) which is entirely unnecessary in achieving the operational objectives. The remaining
percentage is also non-value added activities which are inevitable and have to be incurred under the
current working environment.
The seven wastes (muda) are as follows:
a) Over-production
Produce more than the customer demands. Any excess beyond this (buffer or safety stocks, workin-progress
inventories, etc) ties up valuable labour and material resources that might otherwise
be used efficiently. This creates excessive lead-time, higher storage cost and difficulty in detecting
defects.
Productivity Report 2011/2012
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