Lean Laboratory - Overview

Overview

Healthcare companies operate in a highly regulated manufacturing environments 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), are now being used as best practices across all manufacturing sectors. 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.

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. 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.