Delivering on customer expectations is a shared and common goal for laboratories. Whether they are internal or external to your organisation, delighting customers is the ultimate reward for your work.  Even when you have documented, implemented and trained procedures,

Many laboratories operate as a standalone business or as a supporting function within a larger organisation.  Their goal is to provide accurate test data quickly, so their customers (internal or external) can make decisions.  In a competitive market, how can laboratories increase

First let’s address implementing change. This could be considered a lifelong study. I’ll cover this succinctly before moving onto problem solving and the root cause analysis pocket guide providing a simple technique for both. If we get the problem solving bit right then implementing change becomes a whole lot easier.

When you walk into the lab to start your shift, do you get excited to launch your LIMS or do you dread to use it because it’s too complicated? We all want to be excited to use LIMS, but in reality, there are so many reasons why we’re stuck with this complicated beast of a LIMS that we don’t want to use. “The business can’t afford to upgrade the system”, “We don’t have time to manage the project if we did change systems”, “The business bought this system without consulting the users so we have to use it” – the list of reasons could go on and on. Despite all the obvious reasons for not being excited to use a LIMS, there are genuine quality operational concerns for a lab using a LIMS too complicated for its users. These operational concerns are what I call the ‘side-effect’– muda.