When in Doubt - 5S

We have had a few projects on the go, like making the car fit in the garage now that the temperature is dropping and organizing the pantry now that it is better stocked. These jobs seem somewhat overwhelming, and we found that once again we fell back on our "business" knowledge. Now all the terms I am going to use have homemaking equivalents, but what make these 5 terms work is putting them together.

To start these projects, we basically started by "5S"ing the area. This is a foundation of lean manufacturing, and honestly is one of my secret weapons in a big organizational project. And for all the times I laughed or rolled my eyes and manufacturing engineers "5S"ing parts of their home, I apologize, I was wrong.

5S stands for:

• Seiri (sort)
• Seiton (straighten and set in order)
• Seiso (shine)
• Seiketsu (standardize)
• Shitsuke (sustain)

So basically it ends up being this:

• Sort - go through everything in that area, touch it all and sort it into piles to keep in this area, to move to a more appropriate area, and to purge. Take everything that does not belong in the area OUT!
  
• Shine - I like to shine at this point even though I might have to do it again after strighten - clean it all up, dust, wipe, polish, the works, after all, you just pulled everything out! All those surfaces are clean!
• Straighten - now that you have successfully purged the area of everything that does not belong, set the area in order! Put things in their new home, organize like with like, and items that get used together next to each other as much as possible. Again, if you find something that does not belong in that area take it out!
  
• Shine 2 - this is where shine really belongs, and you might have to do it again, or at least a little touch up.
  
• Standardize - congratulations you have a whole new organized area - now label it or in some way make sure you know what goes where! In manufacturing they will actually take colored tape and tape squares on the floor and label absolutely everything so you know where stuff goes when you are new and come into the area.
• Sustain - this is the tricky one. Now that you have done ALL THIS WORK you certainly don't want to have to do it again! So now you have to maintain the area. This is easy. If it is your pantry just make sure you put things back where you got them from, and when you put away your grocery shopping put it in its spot as opposed to just jamming it all in quickly. When you go into this area you might just want to do a little straighten as you go through, makes it easy to sustain it!
  

And yes, this was one of the first major steps to organizing our pantry, which is looking great! Although not labeled because I am giving myself time to use everything for a while before I commit to its location.

Once I had this done in my pantry I started using another business practice...but that is for next week.