Category: Culture

Regardless of where you are in your lean journey, it’s likely you’ve heard of 5S, the set of five words that serves as a methodology for organizing the workplace. In English, they’re Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize and Sustain. That’s derived from the Japanese origin of Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu and Shitsuke.

In a recent session for Fisher’s Master of Business Operational Excellence class, we had the pleasure of hearing James Hereford, COO of the Palo Alto Medical foundation. While discussing lean deployment in the health-care sector, he touched on using Japanese terms for the tools and methodologies of the Toyota Production System. It’s Hereford’s preference to use the original terms. His succinct defense:

When I moved to the United States from India nine years ago, an important early addition to my vocabulary was the word “silo.” In agriculture, it’s a structure used for the bulk storage of grains. Outside that trade, though, it’s used widely to describe the compartmentalization that forms inside organizations.