You know them by their actions: Nothing in the -80 C is labeled. There are 12 racks in the 4 C and each one has only 4 samples and those are labeled with bad handwriting that say 1, 2, 3 and 4. Every time a freezer alarm sounds it's R&D looking for something that they can't locate right away.
An R&D labs disarray is directly proportional to the amount of space it is allowed to occupy.
In simple terms, it will spread like "Manifest Destiny" through the lab occupying as much space as allowed. Then it will ask for more.
The Story
The R&D department told me that they needed another shelf in the freezer because they ran out of space.
I went with the Director of R&D to the freezer and looked inside at the mostly empty racks and did a 5 Whys.
What we discovered was that much of the contents of the shelf were so old that nobody knew what they were or who did the original experiments.
They were still there because of the "fear" of throwing something valuable away because nothing was labeled.
What occurred next was a 5-S of the freezer.
After many of the items were cleaned out and tossed we then gave accountability of keeping the freezer clean to one individual of the R&D team.
This accountability rotated each week to a new member so everyone felt the difficulty in keeping the shelf organized.
Within 2 months the R&D team started working together to keep the shelf organized.
Other benefits that were quickly realized were:
- Freezer alarms were no longer going off all the time
- Several members started voicing the opinion that they always hated the disorganization
- Everyone was happier to be able to get back to the science and away from the "searching"
- Projects were closed faster and items discarded quickly to make room for new ideas
I want to thank Mike for bringing this question up to me at my last talk. I also want to emphasize that this is not just prevalent in the R&D department of commercial companies but also in most of academia as well. It's hard to "wrangle cats" but not impossible.
