Forensic Laboratory Key Business Metrics and Cost–Benefit Analyses

Forensic top management needs objective metrics dening law enforcement requirements and the associated forensic service costs, capabilities, cost benets, and performance to make good decisions. Traditional forensic laboratory organizational culture is reactive adverse risk management requiring a transformational change to proactive leadership. Law enforcement forensic laboratory service requirements have lacked denition for quantity and type of evidentiary analyses. Forensic service requirements are essential for design and resourcing adequate laboratory capability and managing for acceptable performance. Case submissions are generally received by the laboratory with no advance notice and laboratory management reacts with hopefully enough available resources to provide timely, productive, and quality service. Law enforcement may respond that they cannot predict what types of crimes will occur and what types of evidence require analyses. However, prior data and crime trends can allow us to predict with high certainty the number and types of crimes that will require forensic service annually. No private-sector laboratory could survive without customer service requirements. Valid requirements allow top management to dene, measure, and monitor all laboratory costs for eciency and eectiveness of policies and procedures. How else could management be good stewards of the taxpayer’s dollar? Are the laboratory’s capabilities dened and are they adequate to meet law enforcement’s requirements in productivity, timeliness, and quality? A key set of metrics must be developed, standardized, used, monitored, and benchmarked for best practices. Benchmarking compares laboratories with similar size and scope of services using standardized key metrics for customer requirements, costs, capabilities, cost benets, and performance. Signicant dierences in key metric ratios may require further investigation to determine if one laboratory’s procedure(s) provides better productivity, timeliness, and quality. If so, then other laboratories can benet from adopting that procedure and enjoy increased performance. Most important, all employees (customer, law enforcement, and laboratory) must know their role and impact upon key metrics working toward continual improvement and high performanceand meeting mission requirements directly to Deming’s point #1 for management: constancy of purpose (Deming, 1986b).