“For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.” -Benjamin Franklin
At DiPrete Engineering, we embrace an employee-empowered culture, utilizing Lean methodologies to improve communication, quality, efficiency, and minimize costs. The Lean 6S process is used to organize and minimize items within a workplace in order to make it operate more efficiently. The 6S mantra is “Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain and Safety.”
Each quarter, DiPrete’s 6S Team audits employees’ workspaces and provides feedback on how they can reduce clutter and better organize their office supplies.
“6S follows the concept ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’,” said Joe Duhamel, Project Engineer and 6S Team Leader at DiPrete Engineering. “We recommend that employees label certain supply locations in their office to create an efficient workspace to succeed in their day-to-day tasks. “
DiPrete also implements the Kanban card system to keep public areas organized and to prevent ordering more supplies than necessary. Kanban is a Japanese term: ‘kan’ meaning ‘visual’ and ‘ban’ meaning card. Kanban cards let employees know whether or not an item is in stock, and if not, how much of that supply should be ordered.
“Every item in our supply rooms has a Kanban card noting the minimum amount of the supply that should be available and how much to order when that minimum is reached,” said Joe. “This way inventory is only replenished when necessary.”
To learn more about 6S and how you can implement it in your workplace, visit http://exceeda.net/services/lean-office/.