Laboratorio de Analisis Argentina

Due to increasing competition in the field of medical testing it has become prudent for Laboratorio De Analisis Argentina (LAA) to evaluate its process and identify strengths and weaknesses to improve the operations of their laboratories. An in-depth investigation into day-to-day, step-by-step breakdown of activities has uncovered where, and how LAA can achieve efficient operations. From the original collection of samples to the final step of communicating the test results to the patients, LAA has shown that they have created a process with numerous factors to success as well as room for improvement. The following is a flow chart representative of the steps of the process and the reliance each step has to other steps: While not all information was provided in the same metric for each step, the table below has converted each step to minutes per 1,000 samples to allow the capability to compare one step to another.
Step Minutes per 1000 samples
Collection 0
Processing 210
Distribution 78
Separation 720
Testing 10,000
Storage 90
Communication 1,000

This table, while used as a starting point, does not represent the efficiencies of each step as it does not take into account the number of workers per step. To make each step as efficient as the others and to remove any bottleneck from the process, the worker ratio per step should fit the same ratio as the samples per minute. There should be ten times as many people testing as there are communicating results to patients and a little less than three times as many people processing than there are distributing and so on. This is not the case with LAA. The following table factors in work hours per step and as a result, distinguishes available capacity and reveals the bottleneck. Resource Unit Load (minutes/ sample) Resource Unit Capacity (samples/ minute) Resource Availability Resource Pool Capacity (samples/ minute) Available Capacity (samples/hr)
Processing 0.21 1/.21 3 3/.21 857
Separation 0.72