Creating The Visual Lean Laboratory

CREATING THE VISUAL LABORATORY

The application of Lean Thinking to the laboratory environment has focused on demand levelling and standardisation, but current solutions lack the visuality found in the Visual Factory, a fundamental concept of Lean. Lean levelling solutions have been imposed on the lab, rather than being created and owned by the lab technicians themselves.

Current ‘Lean Lab’ practices are in fact an example of ‘engineered lean, the idea that lean is an engineering process which uses mathematical tools to design solutions. This misses the power of lean as a cultural change process – as Professor Fukushima reminds us in his book ‘The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota’, lean evolved through experimentation rather than being designed. The problem is that it is hard to get commitment and engagement to engineered lean solutions.

In Professor Fukushima’s analysis, the key is to agree standard methods, use standard improvement processes and then engage people in experimentation in order to develop lean solutions. One standard improvement process we have found very powerful is Four Lane Process Mapping, originally developed by Boeing to improve their administrative processes.

A key principle in the evolutionary approach to lean is Visual Management. It is far easier for teams to evolve lean practices if the process is made visual and transparent. This process starts by making standard templates for assays or sequences of assays which can then be scheduled on visual planning boards. The advantage of the visual planning board is that lab capacity is immediately apparent, and progress towards deadlines is obvious. It is a self-managing system run by the lab personnel themselves.

Visual Management is not simply a matter of workload planning but involves skill matrices for staff training and development, performance boards to track lab performance, improvement boards to share improvement ideas and visual standards to remind everyone of the agreed standard methods. Each lab we have worked in has developed it’s own visual management solutions, based on lean principles. This is far more powerful and engaging than an imposed standard solution – each lab has different needs and will apply lean principles in a slightly different way.