The Road to LEAN: Let's Do It in the Bathroom

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Mitu3120
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Joined: Wed Dec 04, 2024 5:19 am

The Road to LEAN: Let's Do It in the Bathroom

Post by Mitu3120 »

When I first introduced the LEAN culture to the Benchmark team, I was a little uncomfortable with a comment from Paul Akers, author of 2 Second LEAN, who states that “it all starts in the bathroom.” He argues that there is no better place to start building and maintaining a culture of continuous improvement than in the bathroom. After all, everyone uses it, so it’s a perfect place to apply the 3 “S”: sweep, sort, and standardize.

Sweep – A clean environment improves morale and actually makes it easier to identify equipment deterioration and/or malfunction.
Sort – Put everything in singapore consumer email list order and remove what is not necessary for the job at hand. It is important to get rid of all clutter and junk.
Standardize – This involves building a workplace consensus for implementing best practices so that everyone understands what to expect and, consequently, what is expected of them.
If I’m honest, I wasn’t sure how the team would react to being “invited” to clean the bathroom. The truth is, we have a fabulous cleaning service so it certainly wasn’t about saving money and switching services. The real goal was to get everyone to start thinking LEAN. So, a little apprehensively I shared this 3 “S” idea with the team at our daily LEAN meeting and was really surprised by the positive reception. Everyone was on board!

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My advice to people who want to create a LEAN culture is to start in the bathroom and slowly work your way up from there. Go ahead, do it in the bathroom! – Paul Akers

We decided to divide all of our global locations into seven main regions: men’s and women’s restrooms, kitchen, lobby, main conference room, and supply room. We had a huge 3 “S” day where everyone was assigned to one of the areas and we all got to work making everything spotless. It was actually a lot of fun. We made a red table with labels for all the stuff that had been sitting around for years. We invited people to take whatever was on the table and whatever was left would be donated, recycled, or go in the trash. This way, we got rid of huge loads of trash that were slowing down our productivity.
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