lean laboratory
Lab Excellence for CAR-T Cell Therapy
How does Lean Lab apply in the era of personalized therapeutics? Adopting Lean Lab Principles for Personalized Therapeutics: Meeting the Need for Speed, Quality, and Scalability in Cell-Based Therapies
Lab Excellence for CAR-T Cell Therapy
How does Lean Lab apply in the era of personalized therapeutics? Adopting Lean Lab Principles for Personalized Therapeutics: Meeting the Need for Speed, Quality, and Scalability in Cell-Based Therapies
Bringing Flow to the Review and Release Process
The concept of flow is a key element in achieving lean operations. This fact has not gone unnoticed by laboratories but many still struggle to achieve real flow and very often the final review and release of samples can prove to be somewhat of a bottle neck. The final review and release tasks should not be thought of as being autonomous or decoupled from the testing process and should be incorporated in the flowed process.
Understanding Service Level Agreements in Lean Projects
Service level agreements provide a basis for the metrics against which performance of groups are measured. Discussing and understanding the reasons for (or even implementing) service level agreements are an important initial stage of Lean projects.
Importance of including Lab Planners when designing Lean Lab solutions
When designing lab solutions, Analysts, Lab Managers, Supervisors and Approvers are all important stakeholders. The solution will be designed so that these stakeholders can carry out their tasks as efficiently and obstruction-free as possible. However, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the lab Planner is also a critical stakeholder, and planning of the workload, both for the lab as a whole and for individual analysts, is the first step to ensuring a levelled workload and flow through the lab.
Applying Lean to the Lab through Visual Management
The effort to make the work and processes visible, in a work environment, is called visual management. In general, there are a couple of key items for any successful application of visual management.
Making Sense of the Chaos in Laboratories
To an outsider (and often even the insiders) laboratories can seem like a workplace hovering on the brink of chaos. The lab is constantly bombarded with hot requests for this lot or a special test for that project. Investigations, vacations, changes in product, adjustments in mix, FDA inspections, equipment issues and narrowly specialized analysts can often add to this sense of chaos. Usually it is difficult to see how work flows in the lab, if in fact it does flow. It can also be next to impossible to identify what is “normal” behavior. One of the critical steps in creating a Lean Lab is separating the routine (or in some cases, the most routine) from the non-routine or non-predictable.
