Matt Scarola
Spencer Muratides
Mr. Cavallo,
LAA has been growing rapidly over the past few years, and sample size has grown to an average of 5000 a day that need processing. Last Friday, July 8th, you expressed concerns about our central labs capacity issues and meeting demand. Some of our key success factors that give LAA a competitive edge are our commitment to 24-hour delivery performance standard, wide variety of test services, and superior test reliability. In the following text, we have supplied you with a detailed analysis of our current demand, capacity, and the issues we are facing as a company. We have also provided suggestions to the problems.
Analysis:
In exhibit 1, we have broken down the activities at LAA and placed them into a flow chart. You can visually see where each process lies in the entire system. We have also listed major resources required at each process, labor. LAA’s central lab is worked 2 eight-hour shifts. Each fulltime employee works 8 hours per day on average. Going over 40 hours a week results in overtime. Part-time employees work an average of 4 hours per day. 1. Sample Collection (Onsite, other labs LAA, external labs): 50 nurses 2. Processing: 2 fulltime employees and 2 part-time employees across 2 shifts. 3. Separation: 2 fulltime employees and 3 part-time employees. 4. Distribution: 1fulltime employees and 2 part-time employees across 2 shifts. 5. Testing: 180 fulltime employees and 15 part-time employees 6. Communication: 16 fulltime employees and 4 part-time employees, 10 per shift. 7. Storing and post test handling: 2 fulltime employees and 1 part-time across 2 shifts.
Please refer to the excel document in exhibit 2 to see a full breakdown of LAA’s capacity available at each process, as well as the minimum, average, and maximum demand at each stage. As you can see, at many processing steps, our capacity is not meeting demand.
Suggestions
Demand variability