5S Without The Pain

Administer and complete 5S audits quickly and consistently using a mobile phone, tablet or laptop using a Power App and Power BI solution.

Customer Pain Points

5S is a cornerstone lean methodology that offers an organized and productive work environment. Working on an area by area basis, teams can systematically organise, sort and declutter by working through the 5S steps of sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain the cycle. Most followers will agree that the last step of “sustain the cycle” can be the hardest “S”. Sustaining requires a good set of checklists as well as regularly reported scores and targets to hold everyone accountable. Maintaining and administering a 5S audit process has a significant time cost for auditors and administrators including:

• maintaining checklists for each area
• collating results across all areas
• monitoring compliance
• reporting on scores

Using paper or cards is commonplace but has a relatively high cost in terms of time and printing costs. Some organisations try to improve their efficiency using generic digital tools like MS Excel or MS Forms. However, these generic tools have limitations. For example, a different MS Form must be created and maintained for each version of the 5S audit. This quickly becomes a new source of pain for organisations. Collating and reporting data and scores also requires manual input.

Solution

In our experience, a dedicated 5S solution was of interest to two different sets of customers. The first customer cohort already have a well-established 5S process and now want to reduce the overhead of managing it. The second set of customers are in the planning stages of establishing 5S and want to make sure that the process will be sustainable when it’s rolled out.

Based on customer conversations, we defined the following functional requirements:

• Easy way to build checklists or audits for each area.
• A fast and consistent user experience for auditors.
• Administrator functionality to configure areas and targets.
• Power BI dashboard to automatically report scores and compliance.

 

We chose Microsoft Power Platform as the development platform. This had some specific advantages including:

• Fits naturally into the existing MS environment and leverages MS security
• Accessible via MS Teams or browser on mobile phone, tablet or computer.
• All data securely stored within customer’s own tenancy and under their control.
• Customers can extend or make changes independently in the low code editor.

By deploying the application in the MS Teams environment, no additional licences are required. Standard MS Office licenses are sufficient.

Benefits and Return On Investment

The solution proved itself quickly in a live environment. The following benefits were noted:

• Faster 5S audits and better user experience.
• Significantly reduced the administration overhead
• Greater visibility and tracking of submitted 5S Sheets.

Our reference customer, a MedTech manufacturer estimates that their 5S program required a significant amount of time per month plus additional work for auditors completing the sheet. Using the 5S application offered a significant monthly payback. As an added bonus, this was a great quick win for the site digital transformation program.

Contact Us

Contact Dataworks for additional information on licensing, training and grant funding. Email: info@dataworks.ie

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