A lean laboratory is one which is focused on processes, procedures, and infrastructure that deliver results in the most efficient way in terms of cost, speed, or both. Lean laboratory is a management and organization process derived from the concept of lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System (TPS). The goal of a lean laboratory is to reduce resource usage and costs while improving productivity, staff morale, and laboratory-driven outcomes.
Overview
Manufacturing companies, including medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, operate in highly regulated environments which often necessitate a great deal of resources, time, and money being expended in the testing, release, and quality assurance of their products. Since the early 1990s, there has been a more widespread drive to adopt more lean approaches both in the manufacturing and testing of products. The advances in lean thinking developed and refined in the automotive industry initially by Toyota (TPS) are now being used as best practices across most manufacturing sectors. The idea of lean laboratory shares its origins with lean manufacturing and uses the same tools to deliver the most efficient and least wasteful processes, tools such as Kaizen, Just In Time (JIT), Heijunka, Kanban, and Six Sigma.
The principles of lean manufacturing have been difficult at times to migrate to laboratories because they are quite different from manufacturing environments. In the hospital laboratory, for example, difficulties arise with the "staunch adherence to traditional laboratory practices, complexity of workflow, and marked variability in sample numbers." In pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical labs, "the limiting belief" that procedures are so different that lean won't work often slow down adoption. 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 still be applied to these types of labs. 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, 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 include the following issues.
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 work in progress
Laboratories often maintain high levels of work in process (WIP), which inevitably results in significant (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.