Updated August 23, 2014.

A laboratory is a target-rich environment for process improvement because it is a room full of processes. Where there is process, there is waste. So the 5S Lean mindset can be so beneficial when lab staff adopt it as standard operating procedure for how they work. 5S Lean methods help people identify wasted time and wasted materials in their work process. When the staff makes small, incremental changes to reduce these types of waste, productivity increases and the process in question becomes more profitable.

Lean methods of waste reduction have proven successful in manufacturing plants for decades. This bodes well for healthcare laboratories because they are set up to operate very similarly to a manufacturing plant. In a lab, a raw material in the form of a blood sample or some other type of bodily specimen (human tissue, or a tumor for example) are the "input" for the process. The sample moves from one person to another in a series of steps within the lab in order to turn this raw material into something else. In manufacturing, that end result is a "finished good" of some kind, i.e. a car, a plane, a chair, even food. In a healthcare lab, the finished good, or the "product" that the lab produces is often a diagnosis or a lab test result that allows the doctor to make a diagnosis for a patient.

Example: A tumor enters the lab process as a raw material. It flows through a multi-step process for testing and analysis. At the end of the process, it may be declared "cancerous". The physician is then able to take this "product" or "finished good" (the test result) and make a diagnosis that her patient has some type of cancer.

The testing and analysis is expensive to perform.

There are human labor costs, supplies, and equipment involved, as well as electricity, HVAC, and real estate costs, to name just a few. Therefore, it becomes very important to strive toward having no wasted time or materials in the process design itself. Here are some ideas about how to achieve this design.

Sort and Set in Order

Make sure everything has its proper place and a visual indicator, both on a macro-level and on a micro-level. At the macro-level, sort and set each bench so that it is placed on the lab floor plan in a way that makes sense to reduce waste. For example, some questions to ask would be:

1. Are the benches that perform the work at the beginning of a given process closest to where the raw material is brought into the lab?
2. Are the benches that perform the most frequent work easily accessible?
3. Are the benches that perform less frequent work located so that they are not in the way of high-traffic patterns to and from the busier benches?
4. Are visual dividers low enough so that teammates can see each other? This often helps with transition steps from within a bench as well as hand-offs to another bench for the following step in the process.
5. Have you taken advantage of putting as many benches, tables, carts, and equipment on casters so that they can be mobile? Giving lab staff the power and control to flexibly relocate these items as needed allows them to make the small, incremental improvements that are the hallmark of Lean.
6. Are there any other visual inhibitors that can be removed? This will alos help improve interaction between staff and create better workflow.

At the micro-level, contained within the lab bench itself, there are also ways to sort materials and equipment and set them in order to improve workflow.

1. At the bench top, have you sorted supplies so that the frequently-used items are separate and more accessible than the less frequently-used items?
2. Have you taken advantage of the many ingenious storage supplies available to help you keep your materials in order, clean, and accessible? There are many kinds of clear acrylic dispensers that enable lab staff to easily locate each supply, as well as alert them when inventory runs low and needs to be refilled.
3. Have you clearly labeled your bench-top supplies so that they are easy to find?
4. Have you labeled your bench-top supplies in an easily understood format, and standardized it to follow the rest of the lab's protocol? This will help keep workflow humming when a staff member is replaced due to being out sick, on vacation, or leaving altogether and is replaced by a new hire.

Use these questions to guide you through your space-planning and design. They will lead you to a work flow that will be sure to produce a return on your 5S Lean investment.