Implementing Lean in the lab

Laboratories are not the same as 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.

Labs often experience the following issues:

• Long and variable lead times – queues in front of tests in which 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 – fast track systems are often developed in an effort to deal with urgent samples but these rarely work. A much better approach is to re-engineer the process to improve the velocity for every sample.
• High levels of work in progress – many labs have high levels of WIP, which results in significant (non-value-adding) effort controlling, tracking and prioritising samples and planning analyst work. Companies often respond to this situation by investing in a laboratory information management system or other costly IT systems.; however these do not in themselves improve performance. The underlying process by which work is organised and moves through the lab must first be re-engineered based on Lean principles.
• Volatile incoming workload – for many labs, incoming workload is inherently volatile, with significant peaks and troughs. This causes low productivity (during troughs) and/or poor lead time performance (during peaks). Often lab capacity is not well understood and there is no mechanism to level the workload.

Applying Lean in the lab
To apply Lean in your lab, start by categorising lab activity as ‘value-add’ or ‘non-value-add’ (from the customer’s perspective). A significant focus of any Lean lab initiative will be to eliminate or reduce non-value-add activities. Develop value stream maps of the overall release process to avoid the error of working on point solutions that only end up moving the bottleneck to another process. For example, there is no real value in reducing analytical lab lead times below a release constraint test in the microbiology lab. You can, however, use increased velocity to help ‘level the load’ or to maximise individual test run efficiency.

Next, define sequences of tests and associated analyst roles that make good use of people and equipment. Depending on workload volatility, use either a pacemaker scheduling or Takt time approach. Once you start testing, keep going and do not let samples queue between tests. This will create a reduced through-put time that can be converted into a lead-time reduction or used to allow samples to wait in an incoming queue to facilitate level loading.

Interpret ‘pull’ as testing according to customer priority. If this is not inherent in the order in which samples arrive, launch samples from an incoming queue according to customer demand and thereafter process them in ‘first in, first out’ order.

The most critical step is levelling the load (overall workload) and the mix (the mix of sample types), in order to put the same amount of work into the lab on a daily basis. This is potentially the most beneficial for the majority of labs. Successfully levelling a volatile load and mix will significantly improve productivity. This can be used to provide additional capacity or converted into a lead-time improvement or cost reduction.

And last, eliminate waste – develop solutions and re-engineer processes to eliminate or reduce the non value add tasks. Use visual management techniques to significantly reduce work planning effort. Ban all Excel trackers!

Many standard Lean tools are not a good fit, but Lean can and should be applied to labs. 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.

Bio:
Tom Reynolds is Operations Practice Director at BSM Consulting. He has almost 20 years of operations and quality management experience, specialising in Electronic Batch Records, TPM/OEE, Accelerated Release and Lean Change Control. He has managed major projects in Organon, Baxter Healthcare, Pfizer, Astellas, Schering Plough and Allergan.

For further information please contact Tom at info@bsmconsulting.co.uk or check out www.bsmconsulting.co.uk.