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amarpreet41
- October 8, 2025
In my years as a manufacturing consultant, I’ve walked through countless factories. I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the brutally inefficient. But there’s one story I’ve seen play out more times than any other: the story of the failed 5S program.
It almost always starts the same way. A leadership team decides it’s time to “get lean.” They announce a 5S initiative with great energy. A “Kaizen event” is scheduled. Over a weekend, the factory is transformed. Floors are painted, shadow boards are hung, and shiny new posters explaining Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain appear on every wall. For a few weeks, there’s a palpable sense of progress. The facility is clean, organized, and efficient.
Then, the slow decay begins.
A tool isn’t returned to its designated spot. A “red-tagged” machine part reappears on a workbench. The daily cleaning checklists start getting pencil-whipped. Six months later, the factory looks almost exactly as it did before, only now the faded 5S posters serve as an ironic monument to a revolution that never was.
If this story feels familiar, you are not alone. While exact figures are hard to pin down, industry experience suggests a staggering failure rate for 5S programs. They are announced with hope, implemented with energy, but ultimately abandoned.
The reason is simple, yet profound: Most companies treat 5S as a one-time cleanup project, not as the deep cultural shift it needs to be. They try to install it like a piece of software, forgetting that the organization’s underlying “operating system”—its culture and habits—remains unchanged.
Sustainable success with 5S is not about posters or checklists. It is built on two foundational pillars that are frequently ignored.
Pillar 1: Active and Obsessive Leadership
The single greatest predictor of 5S failure is passive leadership. Many executives are happy to approve the budget for a 5S program but see it as a task for the shop floor to execute. This is a fatal mistake.
Sustaining 5S requires visible, obsessive, and daily commitment from the very top. It’s the difference between a manager who approves of 5S and a leader who lives it.
Active leadership looks like this:
- Daily Gemba Walks: The plant manager walks the floor every morning, not to check production numbers, but to observe the 5S standards. They ask questions, offer praise for well-maintained areas, and gently course-correct where standards have slipped.
- Accountability as a Metric: 5S adherence is built into the performance reviews for supervisors and middle managers. It is treated with the same seriousness as safety, quality, and productivity KPIs.
- Leading by Example: Leaders maintain their own workspaces to the same exacting standards they expect from the shop floor.
When the team sees that leadership is personally invested in the process every single day, 5S transforms from “a chore we have to do” into “the way we work here.”
Pillar 2: Building Muscle Memory with a DOJO
The second pillar is the creation of a system for continuous, hands-on training. Posters and one-time training sessions are ineffective at changing long-standing habits. For excellence to become instinct, it requires deliberate practice.
This is the principle behind the DOJO training center. A DOJO is not just a classroom; it is a “gym” for manufacturing skills. It is a dedicated space where employees can practice the physical and mental actions of their jobs in a safe, controlled environment.
Within a DOJO, 5S stops being an abstract concept and becomes a tangible skill:
- Operators repeatedly practice the correct sequence for cleaning and inspecting their equipment.
- Teams simulate how to properly sort items using the red-tag system.
- New hires learn the “why” behind every standard, not just the “what.”
This repetitive, hands-on practice builds muscle memory. It rewires the brain so that the correct, standardized process becomes the most natural and automatic way of working. It’s how you embed excellence deep into the DNA of your workforce.
Conclusion: From a Project to a Permanent Culture
The failure of 5S is rarely about the methodology itself. It’s about the implementation. The companies that succeed are the ones that understand that you cannot simply install a new system; you must cultivate a new culture.
It begins with leaders who are willing to be the chief champions of the new standard, and it is sustained by creating an infrastructure for continuous learning and practice.
Stop launching 5S as a weekend project. Instead, commit to the hard, rewarding work of building a culture of discipline and excellence from the ground up. That is the only path to a transformation that lasts.