Beginnings: Where Did 5S Quality Management Practices Come From?

Since the 1950s, American companies have gradually embraced quality management systems (QMS). This adoption has yielded significant benefits, increasing product and workplace quality while improving employee satisfaction, productivity, profitability, and safety. But did you know that many of the concepts underlying quality management have actually come from Japan? In this article series, we will explore one of the best-known Japanese quality frameworks, known as the “5S (Five S)” system. Our investigation will showcase how this popular set of management principles came into being, how American ideas influenced the Japanese creators, and how additional practices have been added to the framework in recent years.

The concepts underlying 5S are a unique confluence of American efficiency principles and ancient Japanese practices, as well as beliefs that have roots in even more ancient Asian cultures.

During World War II, the American military instituted the famous Training Within Industry (TWI) program, which established basic quality and efficiency management certification standards and best practices. Workers trained under these programs improved the quality of American factories and manufacturing operations, which until then had largely lacked standardized approaches to quality maintenance. After the war, efficiency experts and business consultants such as William Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran came to Japan to help rebuild the country; they brought with them awareness of the TWI program, as well as academic and practical theories of how to improve efficiency and organization. While Deming and Juran had largely been ignored in the United States, Japanese business leaders embraced their ideas and immediately began to adapt them to local conditions. Why did this happen so quickly, and what accounted for the different attitude in Japan?

For one thing, Japan was incentivized to change due to having faced hardship and loss during World War II. Although industrialization had swept through Japan in the late 1800s and early 1900s, compared with the United States or United Kingdom, Japan was still relatively undeveloped economically and industrially throughout World War II. Moreover, Japanese ideas of craftsmanship and individuality of work persisted, and remain prominent even today. The idea that a master craftsperson would produce a product, rather than factory production, helped contribute to smaller-scale and less standardized production methods. This traditional way of doing things would, at least at first, seem to discourage embracing ideas of efficiency in mass-production. However, what Deming and Juran also advocated for was a powerful concept that appealed to Japanese business owners and workers: the creation of something greater from the efforts of the group. Rather than being classified as either individual craftspeople or replaceable workers, the teachings of Deming and Juran advocated for each person in a company to hold a critical role, to do it well, and to contribute to a greater whole that exceeded what either a singular mind or a massed workforce could alone. In essence, these principles gave belonging and worth to the individual vis a vis what they could do within the group and ensured that the group would likewise look after and lift up the individual. This was a powerful idea, especially for a country that had lost a sense of belonging and group identity after so many people had been lost to the horrors of war. By uniting people and allowing them to build a new world together, a greater sense of passion was unlocked than a mere efficiency exercise would otherwise suggest.

Japanese students of Deming and Juran also undoubtedly recognized echoes of much older belief systems that pervaded Japanese culture. The concept of removing the unnecessary and emphasizing the essential, for example, related to the longstanding value placed on minimalism. Clearing the mind of clutter was a key component of Zen teachings, which dated to the samurai era and had religious and philosophical roots in other Asian countries that dated to even earlier times. Cleanliness had long been a requirement in the fire-prone Japanese houses and pre-industrialization cities, and had been emphasized during the war as a safeguard against firebombing. Perhaps most importantly, Japanese philosophy had for centuries been influenced by the Chinese belief known as wuxing, a term best translated as “Five Agents”, which envisioned the principles of the world being dictated by a repeating and self-sustaining cycle created by the interaction of five distinct entities (most often believed to be celestial bodies such as planets). This philosophical concept found immediate applicability within the quality management framework, where early Japanese adopters took the teachings of Deming and Juran, condensed the practices down to five key principles, and then applied them to the self-sustaining cyclical framework. Indeed, modern diagrams of the 5S principles and centuries-old wuxing schema are almost completely identical. It is thus little wonder that Deming and Juran found an audience in Japan: regardless of culture or geographical location, similar ideas and desires for the organization of work, workers, and workplaces already existed.

Perhaps even more surprising, however, is just how widespread the desire to achieve these goals was. Completely independent of Deming and Juran, and with no knowledge of traditional Japanese beliefs, the Russian thinker Aleksei Gastev had already proposed a very similar idea to the 5S system in the early 1920s, long before the Training Within Industry pioneering work of Deming and Juran had taken place. Working within the Soviet Union, Gastev envisioned his system (which he called “scientific management”) as a way to improve industrialization’s efficiency by placing the workers at the center of the system. Instead of emphasizing assembly line techniques (such as Henry Ford’s innovations), Gastev thought that the act of the individual workers coming together and working to improve themselves would yield the greatest efficiency within the system. Analysis of Gastev’s “scientific management” is fascinating (and perhaps warrants a separate article), but unfortunately for both Gastev and the world, he was caught up in Soviet politics and executed in the late 1930s, and as a result, his ideas did not leave the Soviet Union and had a much-reduced impact on the rest of the world. But the fact that Gastev, from a completely different social, cultural, and regional perspective nonetheless imagined a similar system to what Deming and Juran were envisioning within corporate America, and what Japanese innovators later created from the synthesis of post-war American teachings and their own ancient culture, demonstrates just how widespread and fundamental these ideas are to the ordering of group organizational structures, both within the context of manufacturing and more broadly for other global applications.

Our 5S article series continues with:

Evolution of 5S Over Time

Read the next part now!

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Authors

Yelena Rymbayeva is the Chief Marketing Officer of QMS2GO. A veteran marketing professional with experience in software, product development, and entertainment-focused startups, she has written extensively on business organizational best practices, efficiency strategies, and quality management system implementation, with an emphasis on small/mid-sized manufacturers and technology development companies.

Nicholas R. Zabaly is the Editor-in-Chief of QMS2GO’s research and knowledgebase operations. An experienced researcher and technical writer, he has worked closely with the company since its foundation and serves as its lead article writer. Specific to the content of this article, he has experience working with Japanese companies and has knowledge of the Japanese language.

Additional References and Resources

The 5S principles are among the most widely discussed business practices of the past 70 years, and significant information and guidance can be obtained by considering the vast quantities of literature devoted to understanding them. While reviewing these resources, please keep in mind that alternative translations of the five ‘S’ words from the original Japanese exist, and that some may provide contradictory interpretations to each other, as well as to the overall approach adopted by this article. Being aware of these alternate interpretations is important, and when in doubt, a consultation of primary Japanese sources is generally the best approach for resolving contradictions which may arise from translation.

[1] American Society for Quality (ASQ) – “Five S Tutorial” – https://asq.org/quality-resources/five-s-tutorial

[2] Fast Company – “Why Designers are Reviving This 30-Year-Old Japanese Productivity Theory” (Meg Miller, May 26, 2017) – https://www.fastcompany.com/90126285/why-designers-are-reviving-this-30-year-old-japanese-productivity-theory

[3] Los Angeles Times – “Rebuilding Japan With the Help of Two Americans” (Mark Magnier, October 25, 1999) – https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-25-ss-26184-story.html

[4] Juran Institute – “The History of Quality Management System” (March 4, 2020) – https://www.juran.com/blog/quality-management-system/

[5] University of Michigan Press – “Managing ‘Modernity’: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia” (Rudra Sil, 2002) – https://books.google.com/books?id=e9PzMlVrERUC

[6] Productivity Press – “5 Pillars of the Visual Workplace: The Sourcebook for 5S Implementation” (Hiroyuki Hirano, 1995) – https://archive.org/details/5pillarsofvisual00hira/mode/2up

[7] Asian Productivity Organization – “The 5S’s: Five Keys to a Total Quality Environment” (Takashi Osada, 1991) – https://books.google.com/books?id=Ll-1AAAAIAAJ

[8] Lean Community – “5S System or 6S System?” (Bartosz Misiurek, 2022) – https://leancommunity.org/the-5s-system-or-the-6s-system/

[9] Sustainability – “From Lean 5S to 7S Methodology Implementing Corporate Social Responsibility Concept” (Jon Fernández Carrera, Alfredo Amor del Olmo, María Romero Cuadrado, María del Mar Espinosa, Luis Romero Cuadrado, September 29, 2021) – https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/19/10810