5S Process Leads to Clean Work Areas in CDOT's Region 3
By Dennis Van Patter, Communications Office
July 15, 2014
At various points in our lives, we find ourselves saying, “Enough is enough.”
That’s what happened recently in the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) Region 3 Traffic & Safety Section at Grand Junction when several employees, including Traffic & Safety Engineer Zane Znamenacek, decided their work area had collected more ‘old stuff’ than it could realistically hold. Clearly, they decided, action was needed.
“We had a mess on our hands, so it was time to clean it up,” Znamenacek recalled with a chuckle. “I brought this up with our work team, and frankly I expected some pushback. But I found out I wasn’t alone. Several of our co-workers had been thinking the same thing.”
Znamenacek then introduced his cleanup concept based on “5S” – sort, shine, stabilize, standardize, and sustain. “That may sound complicated, but basically it’s all about organizing a space to make it more efficient and worker-friendly,” he said.
And then there’s the matter of safety. “As a part of our process to clean up, we looked at all kinds of safety issues, including where our power cords and computer cables were located, and how we might be able to move them to be sure we reduced chances for some kind of tripping accident,” Znamenacek said. “We wanted to make sure storage boxes with heavy loads were secure and couldn’t come down on us. When we looked at our situation analytically, we found many areas we could correct.”
The final factor in the 5S, sustain, was very important in this process. “We talked at length about how we could keep our work space clear, clean, and orderly on an ongoing basis,” Znamenacek said. “We identified some easy weekly procedures to help us do just that.”
This effort was set up to be a type of teambuilding exercise and it turned out to be fun for employees. “I got feedback from co-workers who wondered why we didn’t do this kind of thing earlier,” Znamenacek reported. “The results of our efforts were rewarding for everyone on our team. We feel like we took on our own process improvement effort here and that it has paid dividends.”
Theresia Holman, Program Assistant for the Traffic Section, agreed. "There are a lot of areas that would never have otherwise gotten cleaned or organized, so taking the time to do this was the only way it would ever get done,” she said. “The project was also a real morale booster for the office. We can now take pride in knowing that our work-space is truly ‘our work-space,’ and not the space of all our predecessors."
If your area needs some sprucing up, does this effort sound appealing to you? Znamenacek said he and his co-workers gained some good insight into the process and can provide some tips. Send him an e-mail with any questions you might have.
Some additional notes about the 5S effort in the Region 3 Traffic and Safety Section:
-- After applying 5S, the group completely filled four 50-gallon recycling bins, as well as the dumpster for the entire building with old material and other items that they did not need!
-- The material they found included phone books for the Denver area from the 1980’s, and equipment that is not longer used since it has been obsolete for over 20 years.