Lean QC
Lab Testing - The Prioritization Problem
Lab testing schedules are often dominated by complex prioritization strategies but there is a less stressful way to successfully deal with samples. BSM can help you break out of backlog and improve your labs KPI's and performance.
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.
Paperwork Review in QC Labs – are Dedicated Resources a good idea?
Pharmaceutical testing laboratories face many challenges including high volatility in incoming workloads, non-optimized analyst roles and undefined testing sequences. These issues are often ‘managed’ by dedicating resources to specific tasks and creating subject-matter experts in an attempt to improve performance and reduce errors. More recently there has been a move towards dedicated reviewers, where analysts are “promoted” off the bench into full-time review roles.
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.
