Leica Adds Value with First Customer Kaizen

November 2006

Kaizen (Japanese for "change for the better" or "improvement",is an approach to productivity improvement originated by Japanese manufacturers after World War II. The goals of a kaizen include the elimination of waste (defined as activities that add cost but do not add value), just-in-time delivery, production load leveling of amount and types, standardized work, paced moving lines, and right-sized equipment. Kaizen is a tool that Leica Microsystems' uses as part of its global initiative for continuous improvement, to humanize the workplace, eliminate hard work (both mental and physical), and teach people to see and eliminate waste in business processes.

Leica Microsystems completed its first Value Stream Mapping (VSM) customer kaizen at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA in May 2006. The VSM provided the surgical histology laboratory with a plan to reduce laboratory cycle time by 24%. The kaizen team also identified opportunities to automate the laboratory's current manual operations and reduce laboratory error during the 3-day event. A customer VSM also gives Leica the opportunity to understand a customer's spoken and unspoken needs, to help a customer improve workflow, and to find out how Leica's next generation products can meet their needs.

Through participation in the VSM, Leica customer Kathy Mitchell, Technical Director of Surgical Histology, hoped to identify waste in her laboratory's processes, reduce inventory (specimens, tissue blocks, and slides), and flatten workload to gain efficiency. Skeptical at first, Mitchell felt that the VSM model, which sounded to her like a manufacturing tool, could not be applied to laboratory processes. Nevertheless, Mitchell and her team welcomed and supported the kaizen and were forthcoming with information. Mitchell comments, "It is hard to believe that a company would invest the time to come in and help us identify our opportunities to become more efficient."

Brigham and Women's Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, is an 800 bed hospital that has been listed among the prestigious U.S. News and World Reports "America's Best Hospitals" for many years. The surgical histology laboratory processes 900 tissue blocks and 1850 slides per day. The team studied the process from the arrival of specimens into the grossing area to the end of the process; the organization of slides by case into trays for delivery to pathologists for diagnosis. They observed one notable bottleneck that occurs at 3:00 a.m. when all of the specimens are removed from the many Leica ASP300 tissue processors and must be made into blocks for sectioning. "Identifying bottlenecks helps Leica to identify products that address specific problem areas," explains George Kennedy, Leica North America VP of Sales and Marketing-Specimen Preparation.

"At the end of the VSM, we reported the current state and the future state maps to the customer," says Jan Minshew, Leica Marketing Manager. The team accurately defined the sequence and timing for all of the histology laboratory steps, and identified eight opportunities to streamline the observed process. Minshew continues, "In the case of a customer VSM, we simply provide suggestions and encourage implementation. The Brigham and Women's laboratory staff were intrigued with the process and found it a valuable exercise."

The team also showed laboratory staff how the integration of automated bar code labeling on a cassette could automatically generate labeled slides with a single scan of a bar code. Printing directly onto the slides reduces entry and labeling time, eliminates the necessity to generate and apply paper labels and removes a source of human error. "We are confident that Kathy Mitchell and her team will implement this high level action," says Kennedy. Leica will continue to follow up with the customer to find out which of the eight suggestions will be implemented. "It is amazing that this process reveals the things we have been doing unquestionably for years that may not be necessary," comments David Bowman, Assistant Laboratory Manager.

"This is an exceptional data view of our process," says Mitchell. "Most companies just develop products and throw them at customers in hope that they are a good fit." Leica intends to repeat customer VSMs globally to provide value to customers and help develop next generation product strategy. "We learned that the VSM is absolutely applicable to mapping the processes in a histology lab," sums up Kennedy. "I believe that it is a value-added service that we can use to identify opportunities for laboratory automation and eliminate waste for our customers."

(By Pam Jandura, Marketing Specialist, Leica Microsystems Inc. USA)