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Melvin/Projects/Vacheron 5S

5S for 60 watchmakers, with 30+ bench tools I made myself

Seven months at Vacheron Constantin. I put a Lean 5S method in place across two production workshops with sixty-plus watchmakers, and designed and made thirty-plus bench tools myself along the way.

Category
Hardware · Operations
Organization
Vacheron Constantin, Geneva
Status
Delivered
Dates
Aug 2022 – Feb 2023
2
workshops
60+
watchmakers
30+
tools made
A Vacheron Constantin workshop: rows of watchmakers' benches with microscopes and task lamps, along a wall of windows.
A Vacheron Constantin workshop. The method had to work at every one of the sixty-plus benches, across two workshops like this one.

Seven months, two workshops

This was my first professional experience. Over seven months in Geneva, I put a full Lean 5S method in place across two production workshops with sixty-plus watchmakers, from the first observations to the standard everyone now works to.

The method was the easy part

The 5S method itself fits on one page. The hard part is convincing people with twenty years at the bench to try a different way of arranging their workspace, without suggesting that the way they have always worked was wrong. A workshop does not adopt a method because someone decided it, so I went bench by bench, asked each watchmaker what they needed, and let them judge the result.

The same drawer, before and after

A split photo of a workshop drawer, loose tools on the left and labelled compartments on the right.
Left, the drawer as I found it. Right, the same drawer with a place and a label for every tool, laid out together with the watchmaker who uses it.

Tools made at the bench

I collected the needs at the benches, then made the tools myself. I modelled them in SolidWorks and produced them by CNC, laser cutting, resin printing, FDM and SLS. Thirty-plus tools, each one answering a problem a watchmaker had shown me. In a manufacture where the people judging your work make fine objects for a living, a tool has to be well made or it stays in the drawer.

A tweezer stand, printed in SLS

A grey 3D-printed bench stand holding tweezers and blades, engraved with the Vacheron Constantin name and Maltese cross.
Modelled for one bench, printed, corrected, printed again. The engraving matters, because a tool that looks like it belongs in the workshop gets picked up.

Beyond the bench

The method spread beyond the benches once people asked for it. That is where the bag holders, signs, storage boxes and bottle holders came from, and it was the clearest sign I had that the method was adopted.

The rest of the workshop

Four 3D-printed objects: a bag holder, a sign holder, a storage box and a bottle holder, all bearing the Maltese cross.
Bag holders, signs, storage boxes and bottle holders. Each one fixed a small daily annoyance that nobody had an object for before.

What it taught me

Small changes add up. A drawer that saves ten seconds, sixty times a day, across two workshops, is a lot of time over a year. And an improvement that nobody asked for does not last.