Asked to guess the biggest change on production lines over the past 30 years, most people would probably respond “robots”. But having visited many factories, producing everything from cars to condoms, I think the biggest change is more prosaic: it’s tidiness.
From tyre production at Michelin to less obviously industrial plants such as Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant sorting office, neatness has turned from virtue to necessity.
In some factories I’ve seen, workers manage their stations as though they were planning to eat their lunch off them. Which, unlike their slovenly office-bound counterparts, they would never think of doing.
Automation does help cut clutter: the fewer people in a plant, the easier it is to keep clean. But the more interesting advances in tidy-mindedness on the shop floor have been human ones. An operations manager at a small component-maker reminded me last week that the efficiency and happiness of many manufacturing teams depend on the application of basic techniques inspired by Japanese producers in the 1980s.
One of these, born from lean manufacturing, is the 5S system. The original Ss were Japanese, and they have been loosely translated into English as Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardise and Sustain. The aim is to ensure workspaces and tools are organised and kept clean, allowing work to start immediately and workers to take instant visual stock of their station. The operations manager compared it to the system that allows Formula One engineers to set up and work consistently, whether their Grand Prix is in Baku or Barcelona.
Parents have urged their children to tidy up since parenting began. The roots of 5S may go back to the patriarchal Henry Ford, who instituted a “Can-do” system (Clean, Arrange, Neatness, Discipline, Ongoing Improvement) a century ago.
But by the 1980s, western manufacturing habits had declined, with dire consequences for supply chain management, consistency, efficiency and safety (often now added as a sixth S).
One US plant manager for ABB told the New York Times in 1992 that his first impression from observing Japanese workers was that they were slacking. Then he realised “everything they were doing was value-added work. There was nobody wandering around looking for parts or instructions.” Not surprisingly, production line tidiness is still one of a number of proxy measures for good management.
Where next? One largely unmapped new frontier is your own desk. The “lean office” is already upon us. The concept is often combined with agile working. Agile staff need to wage war on clutter if only to allow the next person who uses their space to sit down and open his or her laptop.