5S Audit App & Software: Ultimate Tool to Sustain Your 5S Program

While the 5S Principles provide the foundation for a clean, organized, and efficient work environment, 5S audits ensure your team consistently adheres to them.

Read on to learn about 5S audits, their purpose, benefits, and how to conduct them effectively. Furthermore, discover why companies are switching to digital 5S software to streamline 5S checks.

How to Optimize 5S Checks With 5S Audit Software?

By using a 5S inspection app, you can track the progress of your 5S implementation in real-time. This allows you to identify improvement areas and measure your plan’s effectiveness. 

Whether it’s about implementing corrective actions or simply having an overview of processes, digital audits are a powerful tool for organizations looking to enhance their workplace excellence.

5S software ensures that your organization stays on track toward achieving and maintaining a clutter-free, organized, and efficient workplace. 

Digital audits offer many advantages, such as:

• Quick Adoption & Compliance: Standardize your procedures and ensure everyone is aware of the standards with frequent inspections and digital checklists. Schedule mandatory self-audits and monitor 5S compliance.
• Efficiency: Paperless, quicker audits and reports result in significant savings in terms of time and resources.
• Real-Time Analysis: The power of digital audits is accurate insights and aggregated analytics. Pinpoint areas of improvement and get a reliable way to measure the true effectiveness of your 5S program.
• Customization: Customize checklists to your organization’s unique needs, and quickly tweak audit questions based on the learnings and corrective actions. Create a continuous, positive loop of improvement in your workplace.
• Communication: Attach photos, annotations, and comments, and share reports instantly. Digital audits provide a seamless, paperless way to improve communication and collaboration between different teams and departments, resulting in optimized performance.

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5S Audits: What Are They in Lean Manufacturing?

5S audit is the process of verifying the implementation of 5S Lean Principles. It involves inspections conducted by auditors, to check how well the workforce and the processes adhere to the 5S methodologies.

The auditors typically look for how well the workspace is organized, if all the labelings are correct, if the team is following the cleaning protocols, and if workers follow the established manufacturing SOPs.

The ultimate goal of a 5S audit is to maintain an efficient, organized, and safe working environment.

Benefits of 5S Checks

5S audits help in maintaining and sustaining standards. They provide a feedback loop that supports a culture of continuous improvement. 5S audits enable organizations to:

• Maintain Standards: 5S inspections offer a structured way to continuously measure the effectiveness of 5S Principles, preventing teams from relapsing into sub-optimal ways of working.
• Identify Areas of Improvement: With an effective 5S audit plan, you can identify issues in the 5S implementation and other challenges hampering productivity; and then create an action plan to overcome them.
• Improve Maintenance Practices: They highlight equipment that needs maintenance, leading to improved preventive maintenance practices and potentially reducing downtime.
• Make Data-Driven Decisions: 5S checks equip teams with rich data about the effectiveness of the implemented actions, used to make strategic and operational decisions. 
• Engage Employees: You can foster a culture of responsibility and accountability amongst workers, encouraging them to actively participate in maintaining manufacturing standards.

5S Audit Procedure: How to Conduct a 5S Audit? 

A 5S audit procedure follows a systematic approach to ensure a comprehensive assessment of adherence to 5S standards and continuous improvement.

1. Establish Audit Standards and Checklists

Start by establishing audit standards against which the auditors would evaluate the workplace. You may want to define criteria for each stage of the 5S steps.

Based on these criteria, create checklists. Outline each item in detail, and attach photos of the ideal state wherever necessary. To measure the outcome numerically, implement a scoring system for questions.

Conducting manufacturing audits on paper and spreadsheets is inefficient, as they are difficult to handle and don’t assist in studying trends.

Therefore, companies are switching to digital auditing software to create their own checklists (or use the existing templates). Auditors can access these digital checklists through mobile phones and perform inspections even in locations with low internet connectivity.

2. Communicating and Training Auditors

Ensure the auditors are well-versed with 5S methodologies, audits, and checklists.

Communicate audit criteria to the inspectors as clearly as possible. They should know how they are expected to apply them and what they are supposed to do in case of non-compliance.

Train auditors in using checklists and how to communicate results to other stakeholders. Introduce audit best practices like adding notes and taking photos of the non-conformances.

3. Scheduling Audits

Consistent and systematic 5S assessments help in creating a culture of accountability. Also, regular audits allow managers to identify when adjustments to the 5S system might be necessary.

Start by determining the frequency of audits – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or a combination thereof – depending on operational needs and area of audits. Implement a rotational schedule to cover all areas.

Determine and allocate the time required to audit each area. Ensure auditors are notified of the upcoming audits and equipped with correct checklists and tools. Your audit scheduling software should be flexible, allowing adjustments/reassignments to accommodate changing priorities and unforeseen circumstances.

4. Conducting the 5S Assessment Audit

Conduct the audit using the established checklists and 5S standards for each step. Ensure you inspect all areas, tools, processes, labels, cleaning SOPs, etc. Audit each area based on 5S categories:

• Sort: Check items or tools not required in the process are removed.
• Set in Order: Verify all materials, tools, and information are easily accessible to workers. Run the 30-second test, which assesses how long a worker takes to find a particular tool. If it’s less than 30 seconds, it is considered a pass.
• Shine: Check if the workplace is spotless, without dirt, leaks, contaminants, foreign materials, etc.
• Standardize: Check how well processes and operations adhere to the defined guidelines and standards.
• Sustain: Verify the implementation of previously suggested corrective measures and assess their impact.

With digital audit tools, you can add comments/notes for further actions, take photos of non-conformances, and assign corrective actions.

5. Compiling Findings

Compile all your findings into a comprehensive report. It should include observations, scores, photos, additional notes, suggested measures, and notable successes. Review the report with other stakeholders to further analyze the findings, gain new insights, and lay out action plans.

With digital inspection tools, you can generate and share reports with the team in just one click. This quick sharing allows faster analysis of the findings and issue resolutions.

These reports also mention automatically calculated 5S audit scores that help businesses quantify and track quality over time.

Scoring a 5S audit involves assigning point values (often 0-3) to each element of 5S. The final score is the average of points scored in each component of the 5S methodology. For example, if a workplace scores 2,1,3,2,1 in each “S,” the total 5S audit score would be 1.8.

Here’s how faster digital audit reports helped Nissin Foods improve its response time:

With the ability to immediately email the report to the relevant parties, we get real-time information that allows our supervisors to sign off corrective actions and resolve any issues much quicker than before.

Eddie Odie, Quality Control Manager, Nissin Foods USA

6. Analyzing Results

Study the outcomes to identify the areas of improvement. Prioritize issues based on urgency and suggest corrective actions after discussing them with your team.

Digital 5S audit software gives you access to earlier audit data to study trends and pinpoint recurring issues. The software assigns scores to all audits, allowing you to assess the performance across departments, categories, locations, etc.

7. Rolling Out Action Plans

Implement the improvement measures highlighted in the previous step. Assign tasks to team members (or contractors), set deadlines, and track their progress.

Conduct follow-up audits to assess the effectiveness of the implemented changes and how well they are sustained. Use the results obtained in the follow-up audits to make further optimizations and continuous improvements.

FAQs About 5S Audits