Articles by Jon Wetzel

Now that you have Carl Douglas’s or Cee-Lo Green’s “Kung Fu Fighting” stuck in your head let’s talk about if you’ve been acting like a true Lab Kung Fu Master. My lab Kung Fu is much better than yours! As a fan of the 70’s Kung Fu movie era, I have realized how similar they are to the scientific lab environment. Lab techs often talk about the skills...Full Article »

As we move into the new year now is the time to look around your surroundings and examine where and how you can effect positive change in your own environment. Mahatma Gandhi said “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”  Let this resonate. Think about the place you want to work and then lead by example. Everything you do affects others and vice versa Ask...Full Article »

Inventory is one of the primary wastes in lean thinking and is also the hardest for people to change their mindset about.  I’ve compiled my list of the top 5 items you need to know in order to understand the downfall of having Inventory laying around. 1- Inventory is a liability      While the accounting department lists your inventory as an asset it is really just...Full Article »

The calendar is a global countermeasure. There are 365 days in a year except every 4 years there are 366 days.  The leap year was a countermeasure developed in 45 BC as part of the Julian calendar. It was created to help compensate for the reality that there are approximately 365 days + 6 hours in the rotation of the earth around the sun.  To be more specific, a solar year is 365 days,...Full Article »

If you don’t know where you are or where you’re going then why are you surprised when you get lost?  In today’s world we KNOW the benefits of Google Maps or having a GPS in our cars so why aren’t we using process maps to guide our business improvements? A dose of reality can cure or paralyse When I did lean consulting one of the first things I asked was “Do you...Full Article »

From a high level perspective a Quality Management System (QMS) is great but to the lab workers it’s more like a pile of “red tape” that stops them from doing or improving their work.  Here’s what you can do to put the “Quality” back into your QMS.  "Something is wrong if workers do not look around each day, find things that are tedious or...Full Article »

I’ve had many a discussion over the past week with my colleagues about what makes a lean system work? The answer every time comes back to a culture of leadership. Everyone in a lean organisation is a leader    While you must have leadership qualities in your executive and managerial staff to succeed you also need it infused into every area of your organisation. Every person in a...Full Article »

In any large organisation there is the tendency to break a process down to specialised groups to work on samples. The problem is that these groups forget the importance of communicating with each other and operate independently on their own agendas. Death by meetings How often have you been in the situation where you’ve identified a problem upstream or downstream of your part of the...Full Article »

Where it all started Most of us started in a lab with one or two other techs labeling our tubes with a fine tip Sharpie marker and using an internal code that made it understandable to our small group of people. “MTO -15” meant Maybe This One sample 15 while testing a new compound or  “12654A2-1” meant sample 12654, A = Tumor, 2 = DNA, and 1 = 1 st isolation. These...Full Article »

Jon Wetzel, founder of the Lean for Everyone blog, joins Andrea Charles from Pharma IQ  to discuss recent technological and commercial trends in the biobanking sector. Pharma IQ: What technological and commercial trends have you seen in the biobanking sector recently? J Wetzel: I think we’ve seen a slow shift from the big experiment to the smaller, discrete datasets that are more...Full Article »