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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the implementation of lean methodology to reduce the turnaround time (TAT) of a clinical laboratory in a super speciality hospital. Delays in report delivery lead to delayed diagnosis increased waiting time and decreased customer satisfaction. The reduction in TAT will lead to increased patient satisfaction, quality of care, employee satisfaction and ultimately the hospital’s revenue.

The generic causes resulting in increasing TAT of clinical laboratories were identified using lean tools and techniques such as value stream mapping (VSM), Gemba, Pareto Analysis and Root Cause Analysis. VSM was used as a tool to analyze the current state of the process and further VSM was used to design the future state with suggestions for process improvements.

This study identified 12 major non-value added factors for the hematology laboratory and 5 major non-value added factors for the biochemistry lab which were acting as bottlenecks resulting in limiting throughput. A four-month research study by the authors together with hospital quality department and laboratory staff members led to reduction of the average TAT from 180 to 95minutes in the hematology lab and from 268 to 208 minutes in the biochemistry lab.

Very few improvement initiatives in Indian healthcare are based on industrial engineering tools and techniques, which might be due to a lack of interaction between healthcare and engineering. The study provides a positive outcome in terms of improving the efficiency of services in hospitals and identifies a scope for lean in the Indian healthcare sector.

Applying lean in the Indian healthcare sector gives its own potential solution to the problem caused, due to a wide gap between lean accessibility and lean implementation. Lean helped in changing the mindset of an organization toward providing the highest quality of services with faster delivery at an optimal cost.

This paper is an effort to reduce the gap between healthcare and industrial engineering and enhancing the use of lean practices in Indian healthcare. The study is motivated toward implementing lean methodology successfully in services.

This study aims to improve the acceleration in the additive manufacturing (AM) process. AM tools, such as extrusion heads, jets, electric arcs, lasers and electron beams (EB), experience negligible forces. However, their speeds are limited by the positioning systems. In addition, a thin tool must travel several kilometers in tiny motions with several turns while realizing the AM part. Hence, acceleration is a more significant limiting factor than the velocity or precision for all except EB.

The sawtooth (ST) scanning strategy presented in this paper minimizes the time by combining three motion features: zigzag scan, 45º or 135º rotation for successive layers in G00 to avoid the CNC interpolation, and modifying these movements along 45º or 135º into sawtooth to halve the turns.

Sawtooth effectiveness is tested using an in-house developed Sand AM (SaAM) apparatus based on the laser–powder bed fusion AM technique. For a simple rectangle layer, the sawtooth achieved a path length reduction of 0.19%–1.49% and reduced the overall time by 3.508–4.889 times, proving that sawtooth uses increased acceleration more effectively than the other three scans. The complex layer study reduced calculated time by 69.80%–139.96% and manufacturing time by 47.35%–86.85%. Sawtooth samples also exhibited less dimensional variation (0.88%) than zigzag 45° (12.94%) along the build direction.

Sawtooth is limited to flying optics AM process.

Development of scanning strategy for flying optics AM process to reduce the warpage by improving the acceleration.