Article
At DASA, we had long ago acquired a lab-to-lab business that was run out of a hard-to-access town in central Brazil and in 2015, this gave us the impetus to push for full automation and centralisation of this business. With full automation and centralisation, we could then also restructure our logistical operations and standardise our testing processes for all our laboratory customers.
A natural part of a laboratory’s growth comes through expansion. Expansion through setting up or acquiring services in new clinical areas, locations and by reaching out to new customer bases. In many countries like Brazil, India, and China, it also means investing smaller, less-accessible cities and towns.
All of us involved in this business know only too well that with this kind of growth comes a need to re-evaluate processes and operations to ensure that we continue to deliver the best value to our customers and eliminate inefficiencies created through duplication.
At DASA, we had long ago acquired a lab-to-lab business that was run out of a hard-to-access town in central Brazil and in 2015, this gave us the impetus to push for full automation and centralisation of this business. With full automation and centralisation, we could then also restructure our logistical operations and standardise our testing processes for all our laboratory customers.
But how could we transform a running business that served more than 5,000 labs out of five central laboratories without disruption? We were performing more than 4.5 million tests per months from more than 2,000 cities. Our logistics team covered an average of 105km per day on 295 logistics routes.
We decided that the long-term dividends of a centralised operation outweighed the challenges and risks posed by such a complex project.
Why take the risk posed by transforming your business?
As one of Brazil’s leading laboratory medicine companies, we needed to embrace innovation to continue delivering value to our customers ahead of the curve. We were already using fully automated systems in our consumer business and had seen the benefits. Full automation would allow us to increase our productivity with optimal use of lab space and better workflow.
In addition by using a modular system, this fully automated platform could be expanded in line with our business needs. Processing all samples in one central lab would ensure that we could trace all samples, measure performance and conduct rigorous quality control.
But most importantly for our customers, full automation would bring down turnaround time through consolidation and improve quality.
Overcoming the challenges of implementation
We made the decision to centralise our lab-to-lab business in a laboratory that also processed tests for our other business operations. So we gave ourselves a very short implementation time to reconfigure our laboratory set up to free up space for the new fully automated system. With detailed migration plans, we were able to complete this without disruption to our other businesses.
In addition, from the outset, we engaged our teams already working in the laboratory as well as the new hires who would support the lab-to-lab business. We also invested substantially in training the new team so that they understood the new processes and equipment as well as the challenges unique to our B2B business.
Adopting a new technology always carries a certain risk, so we worked closely with the manufacturer to agree a risk-sharing framework. In our instance, we were able to share the risk of adopting this new technology with its manufacturer.
But we didn’t stop there. Looking beyond our immediate business needs, we incorporated a number of lean improvements to further enhance performance. Lean implementation in central laboratories is not as advanced as it is in hospitals and this remains a challenges for us, but one that we continue to work on.
Benefits of full automation in numbers
When we evaluated the results of full automation, we confirmed that it allowed us to consolidate up to 70% of our lab-to-lab production in one site. Our service level implementation went up to 70%, while the delay in processing was cut from 2% to 0.5%. It delivered a 15% improvement on service levels and boosted productivity by 14%. It also cut 10 hours from our logistics turnaround time.
All-in-all, adopting full automisation has enabled DASA to secure long-term financial stability, strengthen our reputation and leadership in the Brazilian market and deliver better outcomes for our customers.
Next frontier – AI and full digitisation
Full automation has gone hand-in-hand with our drive to create a fully digital diagnostic data set for our customers. From genomic analysis to clinical imaging scans, all the information is now digitised. Combined with the clinical data from our hospital and primary care partners, we at DASA are now have access to a perfect ecosystem to deliver predictive and preventive medicine.
The digital revolution further allows us to bring greater convenience to our customers. To this end, we have a number of pilot projects where patients only have to visit our labs once as reports and results can all be transmitted digitally to them.
Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), our systems are primed for enhancement through machine learning and our diagnostic expertise supported by AI-based diagnostic algorithms. This will deliver even more accurate results in even less time.
What is very clear is that we are only at the beginning of this journey, but in order to thrive it is a change we need to embrace and the healthcare sector as a whole needs to catch up with other consumer industries.
Through this project, we created the world’s largest integrated lab for lab-to-lab business. But we are continuing on our journey to evolve into a new hybrid that offers state-of-the-art laboratory medicine with the full support and value-add offered by completed digitisation.
This article is based on the presentation: Laboratory operations centralisation: challenges & opportunities for a large automation laboratory at the Roche Efficiency Days (RED) 2018 REDefining perspective in Guangzhou, China.
