5-S practice: The first step towards total quality management

It has been recognized that Japanese firms are clean and orderly. The same is true for high-quality western firms. Over the last two decades, the Japanese have formalized the technique and named it 5-S practice. They believe that it is the baseline for total quality management. As the name is new to most western societies, the objective of this paper is to explain the intricacy of the 5-S so that it can be understood easily and adopted readily by those who may find the tool useful. In Hong Kong, the Government Industry Department has promoted 5-S practice since 1994. Many seminars and workshops have been conducted and they were all very well received by the business community. As a result, the Department commissioned a '5-S Practice Workbook' with 10 successful case studies from the manufacturing, services and public sectors. The experience will also be shared in this article.