I LOVE 5 S !! And material removal pass'

I'm sure that many on this forum will praise 5S for some other reasons. Me, I love it because I get to take this stuff HOME!!!!
I pretty much tooled up my home shop from FMC in Stephenville and thier 5S program. Now we have a new engineer that sold the program to management here!! YES!!!!
"Nobody uses that 12" Baldour grinder."
have fun
i_r_machinist

i_r_machinist said:

"Nobody uses that 12" Baldour grinder."

Click to expand...

Is that the "Shitsuki" part?

When I read the Thread Title I thought 'No way', and got ready for a counterblast etc, etc.
Then I read it
Wonderful! I used to do the same before I retired, and I've now got several ex-colleagues primed to 'catch' things for me. The other useful thing is that after they've thrown things out - machines or material - they then discover that they need something, and guess who knows how to do it.
Keep up the good work.
Alan

I do machine maintance and am in a lot of different plants. I remember one plant that they cleaned up the gauge room, They threw out some old stuff that hadn't been used in a year. Well the next week they had an order and needed the special custom gauges. I can relate many other stories of good equipment and material scrapped. The problem is that 5S is not understood by the people that impliment it.
John

It's great for keeping the shop and machines clean, but I could start a whole new shop with the stuff they throw in the dumpster.
Makes you wish you had a roll off to get the scrap and other stuff.
I had a fixture for lapping collets , but no one knew what it was for so the 5S people got it. Gone forever!
TR.

Just today I needed a 49 in piece of 1 x 8tpi on a setup. I have a bunch of it that some plant threw out. I bought it from the scrap yard for ..15 cts. a pound about a year ago.
Some plant threw out bundles of it and I got my stock. Another place had a bunch of welding rod all different types with no MSD sheets on it.. I got about 500 lb. of rod incuding stainless, inconel, and a bunch of other special stuff for nothing.
I was once in the electronic scrap business and the stuff the military threw out was a goldmine. Most of the test equipment was easy to fix and I had a ready market for it. Some of the stuff was brand new or overhauled before they sold it.

John

This guy came into our valve repair area and wiped them out. Wrote an article for the company paper saying they had save $325K. Article didn't mention the $20k that the valve team had to spend replacing the carbide cutters that they had chunked. ( I missed that one.)
Did I mention the lifetime supply of files?

I am not too proud to dig through a dumpster!
have fun
i_r_dumpsterdiver

It works both ways though. I have a guy in the shop who wont throw away a scrapped part, a random piece of drop, a rounded off allen wrench, or a dull endmill.

When you have your operators spending 15 minutes inspecting a $5 part to figure out if it is good or not, or putting in a crap endmill which results in a bad part, it costs $$$. One of the toughest things for an operator to understand is how throwing away a dull $35 endmill is actually cheaper than using it.

That being said, 5S has been good for my home shop. Not to mention my home office, etc.

5S is a wonderful thing if useable junk finds a good home. I also set up much of my home shop with 5S stuff.

I'm retired now but still do work for my former employer in my shop. I just love selling them back their own stuff. They keep comming back wondering how I work so cheep.
Jim

So of course, there is 'wise' cleanup (and just-in-time) and 'foolish'.

I've never used the fire extinguishers, shall I give them away???

On the other hand, sometimes there's a back story. Like, space in the shop costs $1/sq-ft/month and squeezing out junk allows production of some new product in the same space.

Or, in WA, a business has to be pay property tax on *all of that material* (other places too?) - so that lifetime supply of files might cost more to store than it does to replace.

(The whole "storage garage" industry is based on this - you pay $150 a month to store stuff, usually forever. After about 2 years, you could have bought it all new for less than it cost to store it. So there is something to disposing of stuff you really aren't going to use.)

Of course, if it's set up so the stuff goes to "friends" (employees, vendors you are friendly with) then it's "reuse" which is even better than recycling, and you might be able to borrow back in a pinch.

I wonder too if there would be less silliness if everything was inventoried properly, with notes in the inventory database that said what this is for, why it's here, etc. So then, "Special tool required by contract in support for customer part #xyz" wouldn't get confused with "random bad gauge thrown in a box that ought to go to the carbide recycler".

i_r_machinist said:

I'm sure that many on this forum will praise 5S for some other reasons. Me, I love it because I get to take this stuff HOME!!!!
I pretty much tooled up my home shop from FMC in Stephenville and thier 5S program. Now we have a new engineer that sold the program to management here!! YES!!!!
"Nobody uses that 12" Baldour grinder."
have fun
i_r_machinist

Click to expand...

I also read the title and went WTF? I wish i could take home 1% of the stuff our corporation throws away. I would retire off that alone and not need to do anything else.

We have not used the fire extinguishers. Take those too. I have to remember that next time.

I work in the R&D area which is very much like a typical job shop. We are constantly telling the 5S people to get the hell out of our area and go back to production. We do benefit from 5S when we go dumpster diving and find all kinds of material, tooling, etc that we do not have to spend on our annual tooling budget.

Dull perishable tooling is easily overlooked, while a like new 21" Cushman scroll chuck D11 gets hauled back, cleaned and put to use.

Am I the only one who read this entire thread, and is still completely lost? I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about.

Ok, I googled it. It all makes sense now.

If you're not up to date and haven't been used recently you'll be 5Sed
Alan

5S, you guys must be a bunch of under performers, where I am we have 6S! It is quite a comical program. We 6S something to the dumpster one day and then buy it new the next! It is quite comical how much waste 6S, (or 5S for those of you out there who happen to be missing the extra S) can be from time to time.

I can see where it makes sense in a production line environment but in the prototyping, laboratory and development world it can be quite a waste. The other day at work we had a $500,000 test stand, contract expired, it sat unused for 4months as we negotiated a new one, 4months later we go to start that and some how it was 6s'ed! Now that contract is going to have a $500,000 premium on it!

Unfortunately for us however 6s'ed things get auctioned off or scrapped, you will get fired if you take them home even from the dumpster. They don't want people 6S'ing useful stuff.

Adam

adammil1 said:

I can see where it makes sense in a production line environment but in the prototyping, laboratory and development world it can be quite a waste.
Adam

Click to expand...

Exactly, although it's not universally true. Where I used to work we bought in castings to make enclosures for hazardous area Power Supplies. We didn't make any for a couple of years so they 5Sed the (wooden) Patterns. Now how much space were they taking up in the Stores, and how much would it cost to reproduce them? As chunks of polished wood they were just about worthless. In fact if I'd have known about their trip to the skip I'd have rescued them, but I didn't. However, just as in the last Post, once they'd been trashed the one time cost of remaking them was prohibitive. We never made them again, despite requests from Customers
Alan

Not all of my 5S stories have a happy ending. My buddy brings stuff to my shop that I just grin and pay for, then chunk after he leaves. Like the 20' floormats that had 300 lbs of chips embedded in them.
Alot of it just starts takeing up space. Like the bucket of hardend drill bushings. Or the broaching tool that I still haven't figured out. I'll have to post pictures of that thing. I did salvage about 100 1/2" flange nuts and belville washers off of the milling fixtures he bought for me. I scrapped the rest of the fixtures for what I hope was a profit.
have fun
i_r_

i_r_machinist said:

I'm sure that many on this forum will praise 5S for some other reasons. Me, I love it because I get to take this stuff HOME!!!!
I pretty much tooled up my home shop from FMC in Stephenville and thier 5S program. Now we have a new engineer that sold the program to management here!! YES!!!!
"Nobody uses that 12" Baldour grinder."
have fun
i_r_machinist

Click to expand...

I used to work in a little job shop. We picked up pickup bed loads of end mills, most resharpened,most odd sized, but perfectly usable from a dealer in scrap from the Army. He bought it from them for scrap metal price, then sold it to us at not much above that. Indexing heads,the odd indicator now and then, fascinating place to dig around. Imagine 2 1/2" end mills, for scrap iron price! No wonder our taxes are so high. I looked at a pickup load of that stuff once and figured out that it would cost more new than I had paid in as taxes that year. Not how much I paid after any refund, but what I paid in, and I always pay in more to avoid owing any at the end of the year.
We had a customer in the food-service industry. Made all sorts of institutional food products. Made an egg product for salad bars, worked out to be a foot long egg, to be sliced up on salad. Yolks were separated, whites combined, yolks re-injected, then the product was cooked in a bag, hanging six on a hook. We made the hooks on the hangers. Nice little fab job. Lots of bending and tig welding stainless. Profitable. They used them for their run, put the whole line in storage till they got another run. Then come to find out, somebody 5S'ed the whole rack of hooks. So we made them again. Fortunately we still had the bending jigs. And the welding jigs. 6 months later, guess what. Do it again! 5S is great, but you got to have some common sense in control, or it's a waste. Of course, the way personnel move around, just having somebody who remembers what those little doodads are for is highly unlikely, but perhaps that just speaks for better effort made to retain people than most companies are giving right now. Or at least a set of part numbers and a cataloging system!

Gorrilla,
Aren't you down in the hill country? I've heard about a new wind turbine manufacuring place out that way.
i_r_

when we did our first 5s I had people who had worked in my dept for a year at most who wanted to throw away everything in site. I have been with this company 35 years and have seem many obsolete parts suddenly be needed. Someone suggested a coffin for the stuff to keep for a period of time. A year later half of the stuff was back in service and most of the rest had been modified or replaced. When the other 5s happened, it went straight into the dumpster. We still are suffering from those episodes

We have 6S where I work, they consolidated plants in VA and OK down to just our one plant. The issue is they have temps organizing, and their boss cannot possibly know what EVERYTHING is by looking at it. So many many times the thrower outers are on their way to the dumpster with say ballscrews that are 8' or longer when somebody in the know spots them and says "WHOAAAAAA HOLD ON THERE".

I was thinking as I started into this thread what the founders of the 5s 6s DO with stuff, do they throw it away ?? It seems liability is a big driver in that idea...if you SELL a ballscrew for $100 you might get sued, so you just throw it away instead.

For some odd reason 5s 6s NEVER seems to go past the office door either, they never go in and junk all the toner ctg, keyboards, monitors, sticky notes, and paper clips that office people love to keep stashes of around ;-).

Bill