Development of a Lean Facility Design Roadmap for Design-Bid-Build Forensic Facilities

• NCJ Number: 249818
• Date Published: January 2016
• Length: 45 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2011-DN-BX-K564
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Report (Technical Assistance); Report (Grant Sponsored); Instructional Material
• Award: Forensic Science Training Development and Delivery Program

Annotation

This is a report on the development of Lean Facility Design (LFD) guidelines and checklists, along with their integration with the guidance in the "White Book" ("Forensic Science Laboratories Handbook for Facility Planning, Design, Construction and Relocation"), so as to provide an LFD "roadmap" for planning and constructing 21st century Design-Bid-Build forensic facilities.

Abstract

LFD was introduced as a novel approach to health facility design (Mercurial & Jimmerson, 2011). Although the LFD approach has been successfully implemented in a number of health care research and development and quality management laboratories, it has not yet been applied to the planning and construction of forensic facilities. LFD is an innovative way of aligning employee satisfaction, process efficiency, and product quality with customer satisfaction. It achieves this by focusing on the systematic identification and elimination of unnecessary activities involved in producing a product or delivering a service to clients. The White Book was developed by a group of professionals with expertise in laboratory management, planning, architecture, and engineering. It offers advice for law enforcement agencies in planning, designing, constructing, and relocating publicly funded forensic facilities. In integrating the concepts of LFD and the White Book, the current report provides guidance for planning, designing, constructing, and relocating state-of-the-art forensic facilities. The project used a "value stream design" approach in developing the guidelines, checklists, and LFD roadmap. This approach follows the sequence of steps outlined by the Institute for Operational Excellence (Duggan, 2014), and incorporates a number of improvements and modifications that suit this project's goal. This report details the following five steps for LFD value stream mapping: facility design delineation; current practice facility mapping; lean principles application; future practice facility mapping; and LFD procession. 11 tables, 2 figures, 19 references, and appended checklists and needs assessment