Have You Ever Considered Your Lab as a Logistics Supply Chain?
Sometimes, when you’re trying to come up with a better way to solve a challenge, it can help to step back and consider the situation from a new vantage point. We did this when we were building our new product — Labbit — an intelligent laboratory information management system (LIMS) designed with lab operations as the focus.
We asked ourselves:
- What if we viewed the laboratory as a logistics supply chain?
- Could we manage assays like they’re products?
- What does viewing the entire assay as a unit-of-work rather than the sample as the unit-of-work add to the conversation?
- Are there best practices we can adopt from logistics that could streamline a lab’s operations?
The purpose of this exercise is not to diminish the role of the clinical laboratory. Rather, it’s to see if any novel interdisciplinary concepts could be beneficial in the lab environment.
