5S Audit

What this tool does

CM8-260 is a working 5S audit. You walk an area with a checklist, score each checkpoint from 0 to 4, record what you actually saw, and attach a corrective action, an owner and a due date to every low score. The tool turns the rows into an audit percentage, shows which of the five S is weakest, tracks the score over repeated audits against your target, and prints a report for the area board or the management review.

5S is the workplace-organisation discipline that grew out of Toyota's production system — five Japanese words, usually translated as Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardise and Sustain, that together turn housekeeping from an occasional campaign into a daily habit. Each row here is one question in one audit: the area, the date, the S, the checkpoint, the score and the evidence. Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

The five S, and what an auditor actually looks for

Sort (Seiri) — only what is needed. Is anything in the area that the work does not use? Look for: tools nobody has touched in months, obsolete fixtures and jigs, excess material beyond the agreed quantity, broken equipment awaiting a decision, personal items on work surfaces. The test is simple — for each item, can someone say what it is for and when it was last used? If not, it should carry a red tag or be gone.

Set in order (Seiton) — a place for everything. Does every item that survived the sort have a marked home, and is it in it? Look for: shadow boards with empty or unlabelled outlines, tools loose on benches, unmarked floor zones, materials stored where they block access, anything that takes more than a few seconds to find. The test: could a new starter find every tool and return it correctly without asking?

Shine (Seiso) — clean and inspect. Is the area clean, and is cleaning being used as inspection? Look for: chips, dust and residue on machines, leaks and drips (and whether their source has been found, not just wiped), dirty or missing cleaning equipment, a cleaning schedule that is displayed and actually signed. A leak found during cleaning is Shine working; a leak wiped up daily for a month is Shine failing.

Standardise (Seiketsu) — visual rules. Could anyone tell normal from abnormal at a glance? Look for: photos of the correct state posted at each station, consistent labels and colours, marked minimum and maximum levels on stock, one agreed way of doing the first three S rather than each shift's own version. The test: stand at the entrance — can you see anything wrong from there?

Sustain (Shitsuke) — habits and audits. Does all of this happen when nobody is watching? Look for: previous audit actions closed on time, the daily reset happening without prompting, leaders visibly checking, scores displayed in the area, new starters trained in the standard. Sustain is scored on evidence of routine — dates on sign-off sheets, closed actions — not on the state of the floor on audit day.

Scoring 0–4

Every checkpoint gets one of five anchored scores:

• Score — Anchor — Meaning
• 0 — Not in place — No evidence the practice exists.
• 1 — Major gaps — Attempted, but failing in obvious ways.
• 2 — Partial, inconsistent — Works in places, or works some days.
• 3 — Good, minor gaps — The standard holds; small deviations only.
• 4 — Excellent, sustained — The standard holds and there is evidence it has held over time.

The anchors matter more than the numbers: two auditors using the same words will disagree far less than two auditors guessing what a "3" means. The tool enforces the two habits that keep an audit honest — a score of 0 or 1 must have the finding written down, and a score of 2 or below must carry a corrective action (or a note of why none is possible). A low score with no observation behind it is an opinion, not an audit.

Photograph what you score, and put the reference in the photo/tag field. A photo settles the argument about whether the score was fair, shows the next auditor what "1" looked like so they calibrate to the same standard, and — most usefully — gives the team a before-and-after when the action closes.

Running a 30-minute audit

1. Take the same checklist every time. Ten to fifteen checkpoints, two or three per S, with wording that never changes. Change the wording and you have started a new trend line.
2. Walk the area — do not audit from a desk. Score what you see, not what you are told. "We normally clean that" scores what is in front of you today.
3. Score every checkpoint, low ones with evidence. Write the finding in plain words and photograph it. Resist the urge to average — a checkpoint that is perfect on one bench and absent on the next is a 2, not a 3.
4. Agree the actions before you leave the floor. Every 2-or-below gets an action, an owner and a date, agreed with the area team, not imposed by email afterwards.
5. Post the result in the area the same day. The score per S, the fix-first list, and last audit's score next to it. An audit filed in a folder changes nothing.

Keep the cadence fixed — weekly for a cell finding its feet, monthly for a stable one — and rotate auditors occasionally so the score reflects the area, not one person's eye. When auditors rotate, have the new auditor walk one audit alongside the old one first; consistency between auditors is worth more than any single number.

Why Sustain always scores lowest — and what fixes it

The first three S can be bought with one good clean-up weekend, which is why fresh 5S programmes post impressive early scores. Sustain cannot be bought, because it is not a state of the floor — it is a state of the routine, and it only shows up as evidence over time: actions closed, resets done unprompted, standards followed on the night shift. In the sample audit Sustain averages 1.5 while Sort averages 3.5; that pattern is close to universal.

What fixes it is not another clean-up. It is leader standard work — a short, fixed routine in which the area leader checks the same few things at the same time every day and signs to say so — plus a fixed audit cadence that nobody cancels when the month gets busy, and visible follow-through on actions. Teams stop resetting the area the week they notice that nobody looks. Sustain is a measure of management attention, and it responds to exactly that.

Red-tagging

Red-tagging is the Sort step's mechanism. Anything of doubtful use gets a numbered tag recording what it is, where it was and the date, and moves to a holding area. Items reclaimed within an agreed window — 30 days is common — go back to a marked home; the rest are relocated, sold or scrapped by a named decision, not by quiet accumulation. Put the tag number in the photo/tag field so the audit row and the tag record point at each other. A holding area that only ever fills is not red-tagging; it is relocating the mess.

The score, and reading the trend

The audit percentage is calculated per visit — one area, one date — so audits with different numbers of questions remain comparable. It is shown in full in the trend chart's values so anyone can check the arithmetic. Comparisons only hold while the checklist holds: add easier questions and the score rises for free.

The trend chart plots the most-audited area against your target (set on the Settings tab; 80% is a common working target). Two shapes matter more than any single point. A sawtooth — sharp rise, slow decay, sharp rise — is campaign-driven 5S: the area is cleaned for the audit and drifts afterwards. A steady climb, even a slow one, means the daily habits are doing the work. A sawtooth around 80% is a weaker position than a steady climb through 65%, whatever the averages say.

FAQ

How many checkpoints should an audit have? Ten to fifteen — two or three per S. Enough to cover the area, few enough to walk in half an hour. Depth comes from the findings, not the question count.

Should the area's own team audit itself? Both have value: self-audits build ownership, cross-area audits keep the calibration honest. A common pattern is weekly self-audit, monthly audit by a leader from another area, with both walking together now and then to compare scores.

Is 5S just cleaning? No — cleaning is one fifth of it, and the least important fifth. The point is that abnormality becomes visible: a missing tool, a leak, an overstocked shelf should be obvious at a glance. A spotless area where nothing has a marked home would score well on Shine and poorly on everything else.

Can I compare scores between areas? Cautiously, and only if they use the same checklist and calibrated auditors. The areas-compared chart is best read for shape — which S drags each area down — rather than as a league table.

What about safety? Some organisations add a sixth S for safety. This tool keeps the classic five; if a finding is a safety issue, record it here for the 5S score but raise it through your safety process as well — a 5S audit is not a safety inspection.

Saving your work

Scores, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the rows for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

The arithmetic is deliberately simple — points over points possible — and the tool does it faithfully. Everything that matters sits underneath: whether the checklist covers what matters in your area, whether the auditor scored what they saw, and whether auditors score alike. A 5S score is a structured observation of one day, and its value is in the trend and the actions it generates, not the number itself.

This is a workplace-organisation audit aid. It is not a safety inspection, a hygiene or quality audit, or a compliance record, and a good 5S score does not evidence compliance with anything.