The 5S’s are lean concepts derived from the Japanese words: seiri (sort), seiton (set in order), seiso (shine or purity), seiketsu (standardize), and shitsuke (sustain) (Hirano, 1996).

Improve quality, housekeeping, production control, safety, material flow, performance management and productivity using kanban, FIFO queues, signs, color-codes, labels and visual devices such as Andon boards.

The RAC approach to TQM addresses both technical and cultural issues, stressing the importance of "team" in the TQM effort. RAC's approach, which stresses variability reduction, is the key to continuous process improvement.

It has often come to my mind how to measure an organization success in implementing TQM. If we take the above organizations as a benchmark, all of them are winners of the Baldrige Award.What does it takes for these company to be successful in implementing TQM?

Kanji regarded quality management as “the second industrial revolution.” (1990: 4). Empirical research shows that quality management practices affect firm performance and competitiveness (Das et al., 2000, Douglas and Judge, 2001; Kaynak, 2003).