In: Operations Management
You and your (pick one: wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, roommate) have lived together for 3 years while you both attend university. Your kitchen is a mess: dirty, has lots of with outdated food, disorganized, filled old stuff nobody wants. Your parents are coming to visit for the Thanksgiving holiday. You would like to make a good impression on them since they are paying dearly for your education, so the kitchen problem needs to be to be fixed. Since you now know everything about process improvement under the LEAN system, you would like to implement the 5S LEAN tactic to accomplish your goal. Outline/explain how you would do this using this tactic. Remember: EVERY kitchen has a fridge and it needs the same treatment.
The 5s lean tactic is used to organize, clan and systematically arrange the warehouse for running it efficiently and having a better control over the inventory and operations. To use it in the messed up kitchen it can be explained in the following way:
- Sort- The most important function is to sort out all the items that are in the kitchen or need to be kept. Considering each item, how often it will be used and what is its purpose is essential. First and foremost the utensils and edibles will be divided into two parts wherein utensils will contain all the cookware used to cook and serve and eat the food and edibles will consist of items that are used as ingredients for cooking or eating the food. These items will further be sorted with the degree of use wherein the items that are more often needed, example on daily basis or thrice a week will be kept in a lot and that which are needed once in a while will be kept in another lot. It is also very important to throw away things that are broken, outdated or expired. This will leave us with only the items that we need to organize in the kitchen.
- Set- Once the sorting is done then placing and setting up the items will be required. If the items that are sorted are not placed properly then the sorting will hold no meaning. Placing should be done in such a manner that the items used most should be within easiest reach and the once used periodically can be placed behind them. An important part of setting the items up is labelling them to identify what each jar or box contains. This will help to manage the use of items in future without disturbing the setup easily. For example, ingredients used for cooking should be kept in the closet closest to reach while the process of cooking is going on.
- Shine- The exercises mentioned above will go in vain if the cleanliness and hygiene are not maintained in the kitchen. The items should be cleaned before organizing them on the shelves and the cleanliness should be practised during cooking or any other activity. Cleaning the cooking top, washing the dishes immediately after cooking, keeping the cleaning items like sponges, brushes, wipers, cleaning liquids handy to use them as a mess is created in the kitchen are ways in which the 'shine' and cleanliness can be maintained.
- Standardize- This is the step of forming standard processes and procedures to be followed to maintain the kitchen's organization and cleanliness. To perform every activity step by step as per the standardized form of doing it. For example, loading the items that dirty in the cooking process in the dishwasher hand to hand and not letting them pile up on the cooking counter is the rule to follow while cooking. Such standard rules will help all who enter and use the kitchen to keep it organized and clean.
- Sustain- To maintain the standardized procedures and cleanliness and sustain the systems made in the process it is important to analyze the systems frequently and insert more innovative measures and procedures where it seems missing. A continuous improvement and maintenance of practices are required to sustain the organized and standardized form of the kitchen.