Tips for Improving a Lab’s Efficiency and Safety

No matter what kind of lab you operate, efficiency and safety are essential goals for everybody. Efficiency maintains lab function at its best, while safety keeps your facility moderately free of hazard and error – ultimately safeguarding your team from threats. To help make the most of your lab, our experts on diagnostic specialty kits present these tips for improving your lab’s efficiency and safety:

Improve Work Spaces

Assessing your work areas is one simple but often overlooked way to enhance a lab’s efficiency and safety. Conversely, a cluttered workspace leads to increased threats, the danger of contamination, and delayed production. Encourage routine ‘clean-up’ days and make it manageable for employees to access cleaning caches. Keep the primary workspace clear of instruments, stockpiles, and working solutions when not being utilized. Instead, categorize the spaces with shelves and rack setups that keep everything you require within reach but not in your way.

Improve Flow 

If your laboratory fabricates any products, envisioning your workflow is the most suitable way to discover problematic areas in production. First, sketch a to-scale plan of your complete laboratory facility. (Ideally, this should be copied or converted to a digital design so it can be edited and re-evaluated regularly.) 

Next, map the flow of your lab’s two most critical moving items: people and products. The flow of these should consistently be unidirectional and not overlap. Locate areas where these overlap in your sketch, or go back and forth and consider how to change the layout to ease these overlaps. For example, there might be equipment that you should move closer to the product it operates on. Maybe a scale or stir plate used at multiple stages causes a bottleneck, and your lab could benefit from another. It would be best if you rethought your lab’s work zones to keep production moving in a single direction. 

Improve Waste Reduction

Take a moment and consider excess in your lab. Think about the tools, products, or stockpiles you accumulate the most and ask yourself why. 

Do you consistently keep supplementary supplies on hand to avoid issues related to an inconsistent supplier? The problem, in this circumstance, is your supplier; you can maintain less overstock by locating a more dependable supplier.

Do you produce surplus products because your variability or error rate is too elevated, but you must meet production demands? Discover the root cause of variability and alter it instead of setting yourself up to adjust or re-make products constantly.

Do you create many by-products with a reaction, device, or cleaning method? Assess this approach and brainstorm routines to decrease waste with your crew.

Wherever feasible, address problems and lower waste and excess in the lab. This frees up your storage areas, makes processes more efficient, and saves on disposal expenses and product re-work.

Summary

Each point features numerous ways to enhance a lab’s efficiency and safety. If you attempt one of these methods and notice results, we hope you’ll also try the rest! They all strive for the same overarching objectives:

• Keep tasks straightforward and intuitive.
• Keep spaces clean.
• Equip your team with the required products.

The correct products are vital to keeping your lab operating at its peak – a dependable supplier can help you accomplish this. Contact us today to learn more about our diagnostic specialty kits and medical supply solutions. We are here to help.