Built to Standard: 5S Standardize — Reading a Manufacturing Floor, Part 4

Here's the question Standardize is built to answer: how do you make the improved condition the normal condition—not the condition it happened to be in during the week of the audit, or the day the customer visited, but the condition it's in on an ordinary Tuesday eight months from now?

Without Standardize, the first three S's tend to fade. Tools drift back out of place. Labels get inconsistent. Cleaning slips. People quietly revert to whatever their personal habits were before someone asked them to change. Standardize turns an improvement into an agreed-upon, expected, and verifiable way of working—the difference between an improvement and a habit.