Seiso is Cleaning (1) – The Importance of Seiso

The third ‘S’ in 5S is Seiso; and it simply means Cleaning.

Example 1: Our beloved AR-15

Many of us who have gone through NS (National Service) will remember that all soldiers were given a ‘wife’ when they joined the army. During my time it was the AR-15. Now they have a new one, SAR-something. Right from day 1, we were told to take good care of our wives. We have to keep it clean. And so we were taught how to dismantle our weapons and clean it thoroughly using a variety of tools like tweezers, rifle cleaning rod, steel brushes, flanelite etc. Every morning, when we drew our rifle from the armoury, we had to clean it. Every evening before we return it, we had to clean it again, no matter how late the hour or tired we were.

We had regular rifle inspections, and if our rifles were found to be dirty, it usually meant ‘extra duties’. Cleaning our rifles became such a basic part of army life that we could even dismantle our rifles and clean them in the dark. If you gave me an AR-15 today, it is likely that I would still be able to do it by instinct.

Question is; why is it so important to keep the rifles clean? The simple answer of course, is that we want it to be in tip-top working condition at all times. A dirty rifle is likely to give rise to problems. And in the battlefield this could spell disaster.



Example 2. The beloved lorry.

Some years ago, when I was still working as a management consultant with the National Productivity Board, I was assigned as a Productivity Manager to a company called Tat Seng Paper Containers Pte Ltd on a part time basis. This company produced carton boxes and delivers them to various MNCs. The company had 4 delivery trucks; two were owned by the company and two were owned by subcontractors.

One evening, we had a meeting until quite late in the evening. When the GM, Mr S M Low and I went to the car park, we noticed someone passionately cleaning a delivery truck. I said to Mr Low; “Wow, your staff is really hardworking; cleaning his truck at this hour.”

“That chap is not our employee,” replied the GM, “He is one of the contractors”. You can see why this contractor was so diligent in taking care of his truck. He knew that his livelihood depended on it and thus he needed to keep it in tip-top working condition. He also needed it to last for as long as possible as it represented a big chunk of his investments, probably bought with his hard-earned savings.

The lesson from these two examples is this:

Cleaning is a form of Preventive Maintenance.

Cleaning removes dust and dirt from our equipment. Dust and dirt are the cause of many equipment problems. Hence, we can say that cleaning removes the direct source of many equipment problems. This basic principle is applicable to all equipment; including those that our Creator gave us.


Example 3: Our teeth

Our teeth are important equipment which we use regularly. Some people do not take care of their teeth resulting in their loss before they even reach the age of thirty. But some people, like my dad have a good set of teeth even when they reach a ripe old age. Why the difference? The answer is mainly because the second group of people take good care of their teeth. How?

1) By regular brushing and flossing.
2) By visiting their dentist regularly.

Have you ever thought about what the dentist does whenever you saw him? The first thing he does is to do scaling. Scaling removes the ‘dirt’ which your normal brushing could not. Plus, in the process of scaling, the dentist carries out a detail check of your teeth to detect any minor problem and take action before it becomes serious. You could say, Early detection saves teeth.

Herein lies the second function of Seiso.

Seiso is a form of Checking or Inspection.

Perhaps you can understand better now what I wrote in my first article concerning my visit to Japanese factories. We were told in no uncertain terms that a dirty factory simply cannot be a productive factory. All Japanese workers are responsible for keeping their machines clean. In other words, to take ownership of them.

So far, I have limited my discussion to equipment cleaning. The logic applies to other aspects of your workplace as well - your parts and materials, your facilities, environment etc. although maybe not to such a large extent as equipment.

Next time, I will blog about how to carry out Seiso.

Seiton is Organising

The second ‘S’ in 5S is Seiton; and it means Organising or: To set in order.

It’s another fundamental principle of good workplace organization. Arrange everything systematically, and in a disciplined and user-friendly manner so that anyone can find the right thing without delay. The guiding principle in Seiton is:

► A place of everything,

► Everything in its place.

When I teach this topic, I often advise my trainees to follow three simple rules:

After you have gotten rid of unnecessary items in Seiri, you have only necessary items at your workplace. Arrange or organize them systematically such that they are:

1) Easy to See
2) Easy to Take,
3) Easy to Return.

Furthermore, under Easy to See, you should design a visual control system where it is:

A) Easy to see WHERE

You should have a good address/location system so that each item has its designated location with an address. This includes using a colour code system. Then ensure the system is user-friendly by using large, clear labels. This way, when an item is not returned to its designated location, you can easily spot it.

B) Easy to see WHAT

You should try to implement a system of ‘reserved seats and matching names’. This is especially important when you have many different items that look similar. You want to avoid costly mix-ups and using the wrong items.

C) Easy to see HOW MANY

You should arrange things neatly to facilitate easy counting or measuring. Where applicable, you should indicate clearly when it is time to reorder or replenish; and how much to order.

A Personal Story

In this regard, I would like to share a personal story with you.

When my father was quite old and bed-ridden, my siblings and I hired a Philippino maid to look after him. It was not easy to find a good maid to undertake such a messy job; as most of them were young ladies who shunned this relatively easy but rather ‘dirty’ job. But we were fortunate to find any intelligent middle aged lady by the name of Lita who understood English well. All my father’s doctors praised her because she could quickly follow their instructions on my father’s medications; which made our lives much easier. Of course we had to pay her a comparatively high salary to compensate for the unpleasantness of her duties.

Her biggest fault, however, was that she did not have a good understanding of the concept of Seiton. I remember one occasion when I was conducting a class and she paged me several times. Expecting the worse, I called her as soon as I could and got this ‘urgent’ message, “Sir, sir … no more diapers.”

“How many pieces left?” I asked. “Two” she replied. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” I said in irritation.

I very well couldn’t interrupt my class to go and buy diapers, and thus waited till the end of the day before I rushed down to this shop at Ang Mo Kio Community Hospital called Abdeen’s where adult diapers were sold at a very reasonable price, and bought 2 packets of 10 pieces each. Meantime, my father had to ‘suffer’ some discomfort because his normal consumption of diapers was about 5 pieces per day. Our usual practice was to order via fax from a small company which made home deliveries if you purchased a minimum of 2 boxes. Their lead time was 2 days. It was much cheaper too when we order in bulk like this.

And so I gave Lita a lesson in 5S using the principles of Seiton I mentioned above. Being the smart lass she was, she quickly came up with a system which went something like this.

When the 2 boxes of supplies arrived, she would take out 4 or 5 packets (1 packet has 10 pieces) at put them at the end of my father’s bed. (We bought him a second-hand hospital bed). These 5 packets served as a safety stock. When the rest of the 2 boxes had been used up, she would inform me (the purchasing officer) and then start using the 5 packets which had been set aside. This way, I have sufficient time to react and my father need not suffer from lack of diapers.

I should digress to inform you that it is no simple matter to look after a bedridden old man. Besides diapers, there are many other items to manage, such as gloves, milk powder, Vaseline, urine bags, urinary catheters, disinfectant, cotton buds etc. etc. But as you can see, with a little planning and application of the 5S principles, we can have things under control and minimize the number of crises.



Of course, an in-depth application of Seiton goes far beyond what I have covered here. I shall go into it at a later date.

Clearing Campaign

This past week, I have been doing a lot of Seiri.

As of next week, I will be shutting down my office and working from home. For the past 6 years, I have been sharing office with a couple of friends and associates. But recently, they have gone separate ways, and so to cut costs, I have decided to give up the office and work from home.

The volume of work that my firm has been handling has reduced quite significantly over the past 2 years. And as I approach my 55th year, I think it is good time to move back home and reevaluate my options. I will continue to do free lance consultancy, specializing in 5S; but what I really enjoy doing most at this stage of my career is writing. I have been doing a self-study course with the Writers Bureau and if the opportunity arises, I certainly would like to diversify into this area of work. I ask myself, If not now, when?

Initially, I wanted to bring back 2 steel cabinets to store all by stuff. Then I decided, I better put into practice what I have been teaching others. So I did the first ‘S’ in 5S which is Sort and Discard. Over the past 10 years, I have accumulated tons of equipment, books, files, course notes and documents which I don’t really use or have too many copies of. So, I discarded most of them. I even gave away a mini-fridge, an old photocopier and a pc and laser printer. I also left behind some furniture for the next tenant. Now, I don’t even need the 2 steel cabinets. To save space, I converted many project reports to soft copy, videos tapes to DVDs and CDroms to an external hard disk.

One important principle that you should bear in mind in Seiri is this. You should do it regularly and not wait till an occasion such as the one I am facing, when you are forced to make quick decision. Your chances of making the mistake of accidentally throwing away things you actually need, and keeping things that you don’t need will be much smaller.

Interesting Example of Seiri

In my previous article about getting rid of clutter (Seiri), I mentioned that we should even get rid of useless thoughts and habits! Well I came across something quite similar to that in an article in Today (the newspaper) today.

Writing in his regular Focus on the Family column, Dr James Dobson gave this advice on how to handle the problem of Anxiety.

“It is widely believed now that general anxiety such as agoraphobia or other specific fears are the by-products of powerful feelings that have been repressed, and we must learn to deal with them ….. Only when we’ve begun to clean up the powerful emotions that we’ve stored away in the toxic dump of our minds, will we rid ourselves of the their seepage into our daily lives”.

Get Rid of Clutter

I once read in the Readers Digest of a profession known as Clutter Consultants. These are people who you hired to come into your homes to help you to literally put your house in order. And yes, you might have guessed as the author did, that this could only happen in America, the land of plenty.

The first thing this clutter consultant is likely to do is to get you to practise what in 5S is called Seiri, or Clearing. You have to sort your stuff into necessary and unnecessary; and get rid of the latter. Give, sell, throw; it doesn’t matter. Just don’t keep them lying around. And as one Japanese author put it; you have to be ‘ruthless’.

This is the most fundamental first step towards higher productivity. Many of us have a habit of keeping things which we cannot decide whether or not we needed. In other words, we procrastinate. The first rule in 5S is; When in doubt, get rid of it. Of course this may sound a bit extreme. At the very least, I would say, you should make a decision to decide later. By that I mean, mark those things that you cannot confirm are truly unnecessary. Come back to it X number of months later, and if you still cannot find any use for it - dump it!

But what if I accidentally throw away something that I later discover that I actually needed? Well too bad. It’s a risk we just have to take. The alternative is to keep on procrastinating until we have accumulated a mountain of junk; and then the task simply becomes too daunting, and we give up altogether.

Here are some tips for carrying out Seiri.

1) Do it regularly; daily or weekly or monthly depending on the item. This will prevent the problem building up into a gridlock as mentioned above. For example, for emails, we should delete the obsolete and junk emails at least once a day. A manager once told me he had a subordinate who actually kept several hundred emails in his In-box!

2) Apply Seiri to everything; not just at work but at home. Not just physical things but also intangible things such as emails, addresses/contacts, steps in work procedures etc. One writer even said we should get rid of useless thoughts and habits! I say, don’t forget your own body. Get rid of the useless fats.

3) Set some rules. For example – No more than 10 emails in the In-box. Create a separate KIV folder. File all read emails required for future reference in separate folders and review them once a month.

4) Practise prevention. Think of ways to prevent junk from appearing in the first place. Timely advice you may say, considering that the Great Singapore Sale has just started. Those of you who use emails regularly must have learnt some tricks about how to prevent spam. Anyway, techniques for preventing clutter actually belong to the 4th S which is Seiketsu. More about that later.

In conclusion, I have only this simple advice. Do it now. And start with those places that you have never looked at for a long time. You will be surprised just how much junk you have acquired. Even for stuff which you use regularly, the stationery tray in front of you, the book shelf next to you, your CD collection etc. I guarantee that you will be able to find some junk if you looked hard enough.

And you will also surprised how good it feels to be rid of these junk.

This picture is from an August 2006 Straits Times article about cluttered homes belonging to some old folks which are fire hazards and breeding grounds for bugs. Volunteers visit these homes and try of help the owners to clean up. But “getting people to part with their possessions can be tough”, wrote the reporter Yap Su-Yin.

Where’s the Stuff? (东西在哪里?)

I think many Singaporeans remember this very funny advertisement from Ikea. A group of thugs breaks into a house and confronts a young man.

Thug (menacingly): Where’s the stuff? Hand it over quickly! (presumably referring to drugs)
Young man: I don’t know.
Thug gets impatient and repeats question:
Young man (in exasperated voice): I don’t know. I really don’t know.

And then the camera zooms out and we see the young man’s room is in a complete mess with things strewn all over the place. And the message from the advertisers says: "Storage problems?" ..… I think you can guess what they are selling.

I love this advertisement. It’s funny and it brings across so graphically the basic message of 5S, which is:

Good housekeeping makes it easier to find things and thus improves productivity.

But what happens when you get to the workplace?

Over the past 20 years, I have amassed literally thousands of photos of cluttered, messy and dirty workplaces. Most of the time, people know that it is important to practise good housekeeping, but they are too busy and have ‘no time’. Unfortunately, these people will wait till a crisis arises before they try to put their house in order; such as in the event of an accident, or a warning from the authorities or an impending visit by their customer. In other words, they think that housekeeping is important but not urgent. We will do it when we have time. But the longer you delay, the dirtier the place becomes and the more difficult it is to put right.

In his outstanding book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey says that a highly effective person is one who is 'proactive' and 'puts first things first'. He distinguishes tasks that are urgent but not important, from those that are important but not urgent, and consciously sets aside time for the latter. Good housekeeping, or what we call 5S belongs to the second category. My Japanese teacher, Mr Motomu Baba puts it differently; "Do fire-preventing, not fire-fighting."

So take a good look at your workplace. Is it like the photos below? If it is, in Steven Covey’s book, you are not creative but ineffective.

No Littering in Singapore?

There’s an article in page 35 of The Straits Times today titled, Singapore Wows Vancouver Visitor. Written by a Vancouver architect, planner and property developer, Michael Geller, the article was full of praise for our country; especially its cleanliness. “During my stay, I did not see any litter on the streets.” he declared.


“CLEAN LIVING: No littering, no graffiti … Singapore has to be the cleanest country in the world.”

Really? Maybe if Mr Geller had visited blogger, Walter’s estate, or those of some of Walter’s readers who left comments in his blog, he might have a change of opinion. Of course, he should make his visit early in the morning before our army of cleaners start their rounds.

One of my Japanese 5S teachers at the National Productivity Board, Mr K. Tsuchiya once told us that there are 3 classes of workplaces.

1) A First Class workplace is one where nobody litters and yet everybody is picking up any rubbish that is found.

2) A Second Class workplace is one where some people litter but there are others who pick up the rubbish.

3) A Third Class workplace is one where many people litter but nobody is picking up the rubbish.

Walter’s article about the littering problem in his estate prompted me to ask, Is Singapore 1st, 2nd or 3rd class by Mr Tsuchiya’s yardstick?

There was a time when I liked to ask my trainees what they thought. Usually, most of them would say 2nd class. We have many litter bugs here, but we also employ many cleaners to clean up after them. However, judging by what Walter wrote and what his readers have commented, I suspect we are not even 2nd class because, the litterbugs seem to doing a more efficient job than the cleaners. Hence, nowadays, I dare not put the question to my trainees anymore, for fear of hearing the truth.

As a 5S trainer, I liked to collect newspaper articles regarding the littering/cleanliness problem in Singapore. I post a few of them here. Take a look for yourself and see if you agree with Mr Geller that there’s no littering in Singapore.


The picture above is from 1995


This picture is from 2005. See any improvement?