Process Improvement and the Efficient Frontier: Forecasting the Limits to Strategic Change across Crime Laboratory Areas of Investigation

ABSTRACT

Undertaking programs for process improvement, such as Lean Six Sigma, permit a laboratory to do more with their limited resources. The Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) embraced a Lean Six Sigma change process that led to dramatic increases in capacity, while simultaneously reducing turnaround time (TAT) to a fraction of their historical experience. As other laboratories adopt similar process improvement programs, will those laboratories also experience similar results with higher productivity across the laboratory and reduced turnaround time in every area of scientific investigation? We demonstrate that similar success may be expected with a laboratory's current caseload, but the degree of improvement is related to the size of the political jurisdiction, crime rates, and the resulting caseload; and the degree of inefficiencies at the start of the process improvement program. An understanding of the economic forces at play enables laboratory management to better forecast outcomes and plan for the eventualities. Using data from Project FORESIGHT 2015–2016, tables are provided that permit laboratories to match their caseload within each area of investigation to the forensic laboratory standard for efficiency at that caseload.

KEYWORDS:

• Process improvement
• financial management
• queuing elasticity
• efficiency
• economies of scale

Notes

1. Office of Justice Programs (2016) suggests that for one area of investigation, DNA Casework, the queuing elasticity of demand falls into the elastic range with a value below -1. That suggests that process improvement efforts that reduce TAT will result in an increase in demand for DNA Casework (i.e., greater submissions) at a higher rate than the reduction in TAT.

2. The smoothing is merely an extension of each of the estimated curves through the overlap.