The 6S checklist BRIEFLY

Determine necessary and unnecessary items for the job in the work area and get rid of all unnecessary items.
This may mean you store them somewhere for long-term storage, or perhaps you’ll even dispose of them.

1. SORT (Seiri)
Everything has a place; everything is in its place. Organize and order all items that have been determined
necessary for the job, placing the most used items in the most readily available places. While sorting, consider
marking areas with tape or paint so it’s obvious what goes where

2. Straighten (Seiton)–Also Known

as Set in Order
Clean up the workplace and look for ways to keep it clean. Don’t just do this once. Instead, set up a daily
cleaning routine. One benefit of daily cleaning is you can use it as an opportunity to inspect the work area and
machines for wear and damage.

3. SHINE (Seiso)
It is important that every person in the work space is trained to perform the first three of the 5S’s in a standard
uniform way. This means identifying best practices to keep things as you’ve got them now and creating
consistent procedures for which jobs are done efficiently. Include sort, straighten, and shine in people’s job
responsibilities so they’ll be done consistently.

4. Standardize (Seiketsu)
 The 6S checklist BRIEFLY
Keep up the improvements made and continually improve on them. Signs, posters, meetings, and other methods
of communication can help keep the 5S method and practices fresh and make sure things don’t spiral out of
hand again. Remember it’s not easy to change a company’s culture, and people may have a tendency to slip
back to the old ways if you don’t keep the 5S message fresh in their minds.

5. Sustain (Shitsuke)
6. Safety Ensure that safety measures are put in place and that workers have a safe environment to perform in. Adding
safety to 5S can be as simple as remembering to keep safety in mind at each of the 5S steps. Let’s look at some
examples of this.
During the Sort phase, you can use red tags for items that need to be removed and put yellow tags on EHS
hazards. The red-tagged items go to a central holding spot, and there someone decides what to do with them.
The yellow-tagged items are evaluated separately to see if any safety (or any EHS issues, really) need to be
addressed.

When you’re Straightening, you can organize items not just to maximize efficiency, but with an eye toward safety
as well. For example, don’t just put things in place to maximize worker productivity, but you can also consider
safety/EHS issues such as ergonomic strain for workers at this point.

And during the Shine phase, you can add EHS concerns to a cleaning checklist for workers to perform. For
example, when you’re cleaning and tidying you can also check to make sure chemical containers are securely
closed.

Or, you can think of Safety as a separate step–after Sort, Straighten, and Shine, and before Standardize and
Sustain. So, after you’ve Sorted, Straightened, and Shined, make a separate round of inspections for safety
issues. Then, when you Standardize and Sustain, you can keep the safety issues in mind as well as efficiency
issues.