Journal of Tea Science Research. 2015, Vol. 5, No. 6, 1-14
6
Figure 1: 5S Adaptation in Tea Industry and Success
factories due to the fact that 5S systems were not
developed up to the sustaining stages.
In current context, most organizations are look
forward to find ways of reducing the cost, improve
the quality while increasing the productivity in order
to be more competitive and maintain the organization’s
excellent performance (Hirata, 2001). While considering
ISO 22000 FSMS in contrast to Japanese 5S, it also
has same areas of interventions which had more
alike features where it was better to consider
utilizing adapted systems instead of developing a
completely new system.
Thus ISO 22000:2005 can be further harmonize with
existing 5S systems in tea industry, where features
like work instruction, preventive maintenance,
general housekeeping, training and standardizing
can be used from existing 5S systems with little
modifications to synchronize and right wording to
comply with ISO 22000 and 5S requirements. This
will reduce the time spent for recordings on two
systems. Nevertheless, previous research findings
supported that implementation of 5S in workplace
was substantially correlated to the achievement of
quality assurance certifications like ISO certifications
(Piros, 2013). As a rule of thumb, obtaining such
quality certifications could help increase the customer
perception on company’s reputation and performances
(Elfenbein et al., 2013) where Chemmanur and
Peaglis (2004) explained that who has successfully
implemented 5S/any other quality assurance programs
were critical about the implementation of continuous
improvement at their internal operations.
At the same time, it was very important to decide the
most appropriate policies, practices, standards, tools
and other tactics the organization should take to
remedy the weaknesses identified. As a rule of
thumb, the nature of the organization, type of
activities carried out, as well as its human resources,
tools and technology, has to be aligned to the
company culture while considering external
socio-political constraints. User innovation was very
vital factor in any successful development and
implementation of a document management system
where user requirements and user involvement was
considered as an essential part of the development
process. Thus tea factory officers, managers,
operators and labourers were interviewed, requested
to use the developed documents and asked for the
elements that affect them and incorporated progressive
changes in design until both document management
and user’s requirements are satisfied.
Nonetheless, most of the previous researches on
total quality management (TQM) had proved that, it
was always linked to organizational performance
and excellence (Prajogo and Sohal, 2006; Irani et al.,
2004; Janakiraman and Gopal, 2007; Vijande and
Gonzalez, 2007) which was gaining significance as a
tool of enhancing organizational performance.
However, the success of implementation of TQM as
well as 5S also depends on the development of the
complete and consistent programs (Kaluarachchi,
2009; Hirata, 2001). Empirical studies has shown
that most successful implementations of 5S were
greatly influenced by management leadership,
continuous improvements, supplier quality assurance,
improvement tools and techniques, measurement and
feedback, human resource development, systems and
processes, resources, education and training, as well
as work environment and culture (Rafikul and
Reeduan, 2008). The organizational culture was a
key to the preliminary development and successful
implementation of 5S concept where it has been
identified that conducive cultural characteristics
