Many facilities have many drawers full of tools or other equipment which is difficult to sort through when people need to use something. As part of the lean 5s certification you may be looking at this as an opportunity to increase the efficiency of your facility. Keeping the tools and other items people use well organized and easy to find you can often save a lot of time and energy each year.
What are Custom Foam Drawer Liners
A foam drawer liner is made of firm foam which will help to hold tools and other items in place when a drawer is opened and closed. It can also be labeled with information about what each item is including perhaps the size of the tool. By placing the tools in the proper place everyone who uses them will know exactly where to look and not have to waste their time digging through multiple drawers to try to find something which might not even be there.
You can order a foam for tool organization which is one solid piece and comes with the tools to customize it to fit any type of tool you might have, or you can purchase them to be pre-cut for you. These are both great ways to ensure everything fits in properly and is kept in a neat and orderly way. You’ll also find that by keeping everything organized like this you won’t have to worry about losing or damaging tools nearly as often.
Benefits of Custom Foam Drawer Liners
The obvious benefit of being able to quickly locate the tool you need is just the first of many advantages a facility will realize when they put this system in place. If, for example, one employee is using a specific wrench the next employee won’t spend hours looking for it. If it is not in its place he will know that someone has it. Some places even have a sign out sheet so people can quickly identify where the tool was last being used so they can get it if it is urgent.
For facilities with hundreds of different items in many different drawers it is possible to keep track of which tools go in which drawers on either a computer program or a paper directory. This will help people find the tools they need even faster than just the custom foam drawer liners alone. Of course, this will take some time to set up, but in the long run you’ll be saving many hours of annoying searching for each and every tool.
The time that would have otherwise been spent looking through drawer after drawer is now going to be productive time which means jobs can get done more quickly and efficiently. Every business will love being able to become more efficient by implementing such a simple fix to this age old problem of not being able to find your tools. Just make sure you plan out how you want these inserts to fit and how they should be used to ensure you get the most benefit from them.
Additional Resources
- Tool Storage Ideas– creativesafetysupply.com
- Foam for Tool Boxes– blog.creativesafetysupply.com
- 5S Supplies You Need: Foam Organizers– 5snews.com
- How To Cut Tool Foam– blog.toolfoamsupply.com
- 5S Supplies for Auto Shop– lean-news.com
- How to Create Custom, Durable Labels– thermalboss.com
- Creating Your Own Custom LabelTac Labels– creativesafetypublishing.com
- Reorganizing Your Toolbox– babelplex.com
- Sign Printers To Print All Your Labels– industriallabelprinters.net