IT Hardware Mess
Working in IT can come with many challenges. One of which is keeping a well organized stock room. While I was at Stone Plastics, this was no exception.
Many times, when a piece of equipment was needed, you would go up there and look for it to only come up blank or you would have to wade through a mountain of trash to get what you were looking for. To many of you, these images might look familiar in terms of your current IT storage solution.
My education background is in manufactured quality and chemistry. I always knew the IT storage closet was a bit insane where I worked. One day the regular IT guy went on vacation giving me the opportunity to to dive in to organization under the 5S methodology.
The 5S Methodology
- Sort
- Set in Order
- Shine
- Standardize
- Sustain
I was told by one of the controls engineers that while I might spend some time organizing the IT storage closet, it wouldn't stay clean. It would have to be done periodically. I don't think this is gonna be the case, and it is not because of the people I worked with. It is because the many times before when it was cleaned, no standard was created to sustain.
As you can see, every box is labeled with a title and a picture. Inside every box, every cable is coiled and bound too keep things from tangling. In addition to that I also created a kanban card system to help make sure people never had to wait on a cable to set something up.
The persons before me didn't standardize the area, and you can't sustain your sort or set in order without standardization. Following months of work, these were the results.
IT Hardware Cleaned Up
