Red Tag

It is obvious that 5S, which stands for Sort, Set, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain, is so important for the company, particularly manufacturing plants.
Sort, that is to get rid of clutter, is the first step to come up with 5S. Unless otherwise this Sort is ‘well done’, we won’t be able to proceed to the next step or Set, which is set in order and organize the work area.

I, as a Kaizen consultant, usually coordinate to make a 5S Kaizen team, comprising of engineering, production, maintenance, quality, procurement, and accounting, to address this 5S activity. But the 5S activity is not only for the Kaizen team members but also for all the employees of the company.

For us to address the Sort, which to eliminate unnecessary items, I found out the Red Tag is so effective tool to get many employees involved in.
Here is the way how I take action using the Red Tag.

1. Prepare the Red Tags
2. Choose area we visit to observe — mostly materials warehouse
3. Visit the area then see non-moving materials
4. Ask a person in charge of the materials whether we need to keep or obsolete
5. Post the Red Tag to the storage bin or items if unnecessary
6. If the person in charge cannot identify whether need or not, ask the manufacturing supervisor or leader if needs to be kept or disposed
7. After completion of posting the Red Tags at the area, all the materials with the Red Tags should be transferred to the disposal area

Red Tag is an inexpensive way and one of the highly visible management tools for waste elimination. It may be true that the Management is rather interested in process improvement with zero defects, though, no matter how small the volume of the materials to be eliminated by this activity is. It results in optimizing space utilization with whole 5S activities in the near future.