When mapping your laboratory processes, where should you start?

Whether you’re a Black Belt or new to laboratory performance improvement, Power of Process (PoP) qualifications – including the Pioneer, the Champion and the Master – can be of great benefit to your ability to grasp the complexity in laboratory processes and accurately determine the right course of action for continuous improvement. PoP offers a standardised way to observe, document and challenge process flows, as well as how to design and successfully implement radically improved process flows. By completing these courses, Lean practitioners will find value in learning how to identify new improvement opportunities that they might previously have considered to be counter-intuitive.

PoP teaches us that, in order to fundamentally and radically improve our processes, we need to have a detailed and accurate process map of the current state against the current performance, which can be measured and fully understood. This then also serves as a baseline against the future state, which can be measured and evaluated. The methodology offered by the Power of Process Champion course in particular offers an opportunity to learn from the process, essentially creating a common performance language in your laboratory. This learning forms an important part of the change management process. PoP also looks at the application of The 8 Principles of Laboratory Performance, allowing laboratory professionals to structure a laboratory for certainty, putting certainty into practice and ultimately sustaining performance improvement in the long run.

A global characteristic of laboratories today is that they face a myriad organisational challenges including market needs, capacity constraints and innovation. Lean’s Value Stream Mapping (VSM) stops short of addressing these challenges. Lean is focused on the removal of waste. Designed as a continuous improvement methodology, Lean allows short-term improvement contributions in key performance indicators such as turnaround time (TAT), often with diminishing returns in each iterative cycle of “Plan, Do, Check, Act”. By focusing on waste, it is a challenge for a laboratory to “unlearn” the bad habits enforced by the current process and identify new process flows.

Interested in finding out more about the Power of Process? Visit the course outline, or contact us to help you get your laboratory processes up to speed.