Lean laboratory

A lean laboratory is one which is focused on testing products and materials to deliver results in the most efficient way in terms of cost or speed or both. Lean laboratory is a management and organization process derived from Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System (TPS).[1] The goal of a Lean laboratory is to use less effort, fewer resources, and less time to test incoming samples. Lean laboratory programs are generally associated with Food, Beverage, Life Science and Pharmaceutical companies.

Overview

Healthcare companies operate in highly regulated manufacturing environments [2] which often necessitate a great deal of resources, time and money, being expended in the testing, release and Quality Assurance of their products. In recent years there has been a drive to adopt a more Lean approach both in the manufacturing and testing of products. The advances in Lean thinking developed and refined in the automotive industry initially by Toyota (TPS),[3] are now being used as best practices across all manufacturing sectors.[4] Lean Laboratory shares its origins with Lean Manufacturing and utilises the same tools to deliver the most efficient and least wasteful process. Tools such as Kaizen, Just In Time (JIT), Heijunka and Six Sigma.[5]

The principles of lean manufacturing have been slow to migrate to laboratories because they are quite different from manufacturing environments. While most of the key principles of traditional Lean still apply, there are many unique challenges involved in effectively implementing them in laboratories. Compared to manufacturing environments most analytical and microbiological laboratories have a relatively low volume of samples but a high degree of variability and complexity. Many standard lean tools are not a good fit, however Lean can be applied to labs.[6] A generic approach is not suitable for laboratories but careful adaptation of the techniques based on a thorough understanding of Lab operations will deliver significant benefits in terms of cost or speed or both.

Conventional laboratories

It is a common occurrence for testing laboratories to suffer from long and variable lead times. Some of the problems or issues which can be attributed to conventional or “non lean” laboratories are:

Lack of focus

Analysts and Microbiologists are typically focused on test accuracy and individual test run efficiency. Very often, personnel are dedicated to specific tests and there is little or no control of the progress of individual samples through a sometimes highly variable test routing that can be dependent on product type and/or the intended market.

Long and variable lead times

In many test laboratories, it is normal to find queues in front of each test where individual samples wait until enough similar samples arrive to constitute an ‘efficient test run’. This approach causes long and variable lead times and, contrary to popular belief, does not result in higher productivity.

Ineffective 'fast track' systems

To deal with the long lead times, ‘Fast Track’ systems are often developed in an effort to deal with urgent samples but these often become unworkable. Frequently, the proportion of samples designated as priority becomes so large that ‘fast tracking’ quickly becomes ineffective.

High levels of WIP

Laboratories often maintain high levels of work in process (WIP) which inevitably results in lots of (non value adding) effort being expended in controlling, tracking and prioritizing samples and in planning analyst work. Companies often respond to this situation by investing in a "Laboratory Information Management System" (LIMS) or some other IT system. However these systems do not in themselves improve performance. The underlying process by which work is organized and moves through the lab must first be re-engineered based on lean principles.

Volatile incoming workload

For many testing laboratories the incoming workload is inherently volatile with significant peaks and dips. This causes low productivity (during dips) and/or poor lead time performance (during peaks). Very often the capacity of the lab is not well understood and there is no mechanism to level or smooth the workload.

Implementing lean in the lab

To address the above problems and issues a Lean Laboratory uses Lean principles to eliminate waste or Muda (Japanese term). There are a number of principles that can be used but the goal is always primarily focused on improving measurable performance and/or reducing costs. The following key principles always apply:

Specify value

The first step in designing any Lean laboratory is to specify value. Every activity in the laboratory is identified and categorizing as ‘value add’, ‘non value add’ (from the customers perspective) and ‘incidental’. Incidental work is non value add in itself but essential to enable ‘value add’ tasks to be carried out. A significant focus of any Lean Lab initiative will be to eliminate or reduce the non value add activities.

Identify the value stream

Another key Lean step is to develop value stream maps[7] of the overall release process. This should avoid the error of working on point solutions that only end up moving a bottleneck to another process and therefore do not deliver overall improvements. For example, there is no real value in reducing analytical laboratory lead times below the time of a release constraint test in the Microbiology lab. You can however use increased velocity to help ‘level the load’ or to maximize individual test run efficiency.

Make value flow and create pull

A Lean laboratory will normally have a defined sequence of tests and associated analyst roles that make good use of people and equipment. A key principle is to flow work through the laboratory so that once testing begins on a sample, it is kept moving and not allowed to queue between tests. This creates a focus and drive to reduce ‘through-put’ time which can be converted into a lead-time reduction or used to allow samples to wait in an incoming queue to facilitate level loading and /or grouping for efficiency.

‘Pull’ is interpreted as testing according to customer priority. If this is not inherent in the order in which samples arrive, then the samples are taken from an incoming queue according to customer demand and thereafter processed in FIFO order with no overtaking.

Level the load and the mix (heijunka)

At its simplest, leveling the load (overall workload) and the mix (the mix of sample types) is about putting the same amount of work into the lab on a daily basis. This is probably the most critical step and potentially the most beneficial for the majority of testing Laboratories. Successfully leveling a volatile load and mix will significantly improve productivity and/or lead time. The productivity improvement can be used to provide additional capacity or converted into a cost reduction.

Eliminate waste (muda)

Lean laboratories continuously look to develop solutions and re-engineer processes to eliminate or reduce the non value add and incidental tasks identified when ‘specifying value’.

Manage performance

An essential part of Lean in the Laboratory is to manage and review labs performance daily, ensuring that Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) are good and that the overall laboratory process is ‘in control’.

References

  1. ↑ Womack, James P., Jones, Daniel T., and Roos, Daniel (1991), The Machine That Changed the World
  2. ↑ Kirsch, Clifford E., Trelease, Nathaniel T. (2004), Advising High-Technology Companies ISBN 1-4024-0396-8
  3. ↑ Toyota Production System, Taichi Ohno (1988), Productivity Press, p 8, ISBN 0-915299-14-3
  4. ↑ Hobbs, Dennis P. (2003), Lean Manufacturing Implementation: A Complete Execution Manual for Any Size Manufacturer, ISBN 1-932159-14-2
  5. ↑ Pyzdek, Thomas (2003), The Six Sigma Handbook
  6. ↑ Zidel, Tom (2006), A Lean Guide to Transforming Healthcare ISBN 0-87389-701-3
  7. ↑ Tapping, Don, Luyster, Tom, Shuker, Tom (2002), Value Stream Management

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