After more than a year of COVID-19 posts, I’m going to return today to the original purpose of this blog which is to share project management strategies and show how they apply to scientists and laboratory work. Today I’m going to be discussing something we all instinctively know about but don’t always have the language for, waste. I’m not just talking about biohazard waste or trash, I’m talking about the meetings that we know are a waste of time and the days that feel liked wasted effort.

The categories of waste I’ll be using today come from a process known as Lean manufacturing which was derived from Toyota’s operating model established in 1940s which continued to evolve and was acknowledged in the 1980s as a key part of led to a unique system of production management that became the foundation for Toyota’s success. The Toyota Way or Toyota Production System (TPS) is organized around the idea that you can design out overburdens, inconsistencies, and waste. By identifying and naming these critical aspects, it becomes easier to tackle each and ensure an operation, either a laboratory or a manufacturing plant, runs smoothly.

Transport

Transport waste involves having to physically move people and things from where they are left to where they are needed across large distances, smaller distances are covered under motion waste. For those who work in an animal facility, the animals may be kept in a location close to where you can perform surgery and other animal focused work but very distant from the cell culture space where you actually examine animal samples. I’ve seen some animal projects that require one space for the animals’ housing, another for surgery, a third for sample preparation, and a fourth for analysis like microscopy or flow cytometry. The longer the distance between these spaces, the more transport waste you have. If all of these spaces are housed within the animal facility then you’re able to accomplish all of the steps much faster than if you must gown in and out of the facility and then cross multiple floors or even multiple buildings to accomplish your work.

Think of how far a Primary Investigator is from the laboratory as a practical example of transport waste. It’s much easier to visit the PI from the lab when their office is just across the hall, versus how it might not be worth the effort and time of walking down to the end of the building or even to another floor to ask a simple question rather than trying something on your own first. This particular example of transport waste also works the other way, where a PI is more likely to stop by the lab if it is within the distance of a quick stretch rather than far enough away that you have to think of scheduling time to go between lab and the office.

Fixing transport waste isn’t easy, because it usually involves a lot of engineering to ensure that appropriate spaces are physically grouped together and for laboratories with regulations that control how spaces can are accessed certain conveniences become impossible. The truth is, sometimes there just aren’t enough plugs, benches, offices, or materials to allow for easy access and minimal transport time. For these situations, you are left to innovate the best solution available to you which may mean trading offices with someone in another department, changing a dedicated hood into a common one at a central location, or possibly sacrificing easy access to a less used piece of large equipment to prioritize ease of access to a more critical piece of equipment.

Inventory

As someone who has ordered materials for a lab for years, inventory is both my favorite and most frustrating kind of waste. Inventory waste is about having too much of a material on hand, unlike what normally springs to mind with inventory problems when there is too little (which is Waiting waste). Every lab I have ever been in has been desperate for additional storage solutions, there’s just never enough space for all of the equipment, personnel, and materials needed to run the laboratory! This can be worsened by the general scientific tendency to become a hoarder of patient samples, cell lines, and other rare materials. Keeping too many samples from concluded experiments can lead to cluttered freezers which can take up valuable space and more valuable emergency power resources. When a resource space or emergency power outlets are limited, it’s easy to clutter up your area with inventory waste.

Compounding the problem, every company is happy enough to sell bulk quantities tips, tubes, and other common materials that can far outstrip how much you would use in several months or even years. Downside: You have to find somewhere to put all of these things until they’re needed. While some materials like gloves and tubes cause over stocking problems in storage spaces, others have high costs due to expiration. Expensive media, enzymes, and other reagents have to be kept at specific storage conditions and can rapidly loose potency causing twice the problem. Using recently expired materials, one to two months, is something a lot of research laboratories can get away with but I know of scientists using materials that are years out of date and it’s hard to imagine that the old materials are not affecting their results.

By keeping a lean inventory where you order what you need as you need it, factoring in experiment timelines and delivery lead times, you’re able to prevent a lot of wasted storage around the lab and wasted expired materials. These method though is entirely dependent on the lab members and PI taking the time to not only properly plan out experiments while factoring in what they’ll need in supplies for the project. For precious samples from previous research, your institute should have guidelines for keeping research materials. Another good practice is to work with departing researchers to clear out their own boxes of sample to limit what will be kept. By focusing on not just what you need today and instead focusing on what you’ll need for the total project and over what time, you can cut waste and embrace LEAN laboratory practices.

Motion

Earlier with transport waste I mentioned transportation between buildings and floors, motion waste focuses on how much time you spend going back and forth in a limited area trying to accomplish a single task. Overall, motion waste can be summarized as the time wasted getting something that should be readily available at your fingertips. In the laboratory this waste could be the time and effort you waste tracking down the tubes that have run out, or fetching supplies stored in an inconvenient location far from where they are used; possibly stored there because your storage area is cluttered with inventory waste taking up the useful space. Interestingly, motion waste also includes the time you waste trying to find the correct document or file on a computer.

While some groups are able to let people have their own dedicated space, others use shared equipment and bench. Shared spaces can be a large source of motion waste if you first must potentially clear and clean the bench or hood before you even get the chance to bring in your own reagents and begin your work. It’s easy to maintain your own space to your standard of supply and cleanliness but shared spaces can quickly become neglected with just the lack of effort from a single person. The nuisance caused by neglecting common area can be felt by an entire department and cause wasted motion and time because one person tries to save a few minutes of their own time by skipping cleanup.

The modern laboratory is tied closely with computers no matter the type of science. Records must be kept, emails must be checked, and writing must be performed on computers. All of the files that go into the computer have to be organized in some form or fashion, and motion waste covers the time spent at the computer hunting for what you need. For files used frequently the paths become fairly well known and tread while the folders that are used infrequently or were left disorganized can be so labyrinthine you think you’re certain to find a minotaur before you find the old post-doc’s data.

Motion waste can be some of the hardest waste to tackle because it rarely depends on a single person’s efforts. To be able to minimize wasted motion in a laboratory, there has to be a concerted group effort to keep things clean, stocked, and available. As mentioned previously, this can be especially difficult in laboratory settings where a resource is shared across a large group of people, a department, users of a core facility, etc, where no one person is in charge of maintaining the area and a few lab members who don’t care for the space properly can ruin ease of use for the entire group. Ideally, by keeping shared areas common to just a few users it can be easier to keep everyone working towards the same goal of minimizing motion and other wastes.

Waiting

While inventory may be my favorite waste, waiting is definitely the one I recognize the most. It really feels like there are 1,001 different ways that time can be wasted in the laboratory waiting on something. Waiting on a piece of equipment to come available, waiting on something to cool down, to warm up, to incubate, waiting on someone to come out of a meeting, to go into a meeting, waiting on the computer to finish processing data, waiting on something to print, waiting is just omnipresent in the laboratory and is why time management skills are so critical in science.

My first personal rule of thumb about waiting is that if anything takes less than 30 minutes, it’s worth waiting for in the middle of an experiment but not at the beginning or end. For instance, if I need to thaw my reagents for 30 minutes before running an assay I can absolutely start thawing my reagents and task switch to something else but if I have a 30 minute centrifuge run in the middle of a long process it’s better to wait with the centrifuge rather than risk mistiming the run by trying to do something else with those in-between 30 minutes. Waiting is inevitable with some processes and should be considered part of the process rather than waste during those instances.

On the management side, waiting is also considered waste if a resource goes severely underutilized. Think of a big, expensive piece of equipment that sits in a corner and rarely gets used, the time that machine is “waiting” to be useful is also considered waiting waste. This is why departments, colleges, institutes have shared facilities for those more specialized pieces of equipment and the reason a laboratory might not get an ultracentrifuge because there’s one sitting unused just down the hallway. Equipment waiting waste is better evaluated at department levels and higher where people can communicate total need so resources can be well distributed.

Waiting waste can easily be caused by one person’s time management capability, if one person is always dragging meetings over time they can be inflicting waiting periods on others even while they schedule the excess into their personal schedule. With clear boundaries and deadline expectations, it can be easier to work with people who are chronically behind. Other waiting issues based on equipment use can be fixed with having people schedule their times on limited equipment, which allows people at the bench to better plan their day around available resources. While a lot of small things can be done to minimize waiting times you can still get stuck in the printer que behind the person printing a 60 page paper, so never consider waiting waste as something that can be completely solved. To best manage waiting waste, have people take note of when it occurs and tackle problems in order of priority. If a person is responsible for causing a particularly large amount of waste, it’s not so much a problem to be solved but the time to start teaching (or possibly learning and practicing if the person is you) time management skills.

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