Growing up just thirty minutes from this business, I found it strange that I had no clue how large LabCorp truly is. I went into this tour knowing that the company specializes in scientific activities, however, I did not know exactly which field they were in. As it turns out, LabCorp is a worldwide company with a lab in just about every highly developed state across America.
A few years back LabCorp entered the New York Stock Market and has grown significantly ever since. The company is set up to mainly cater to health care providers such as hospitals and and doctors offices. This means that every time a doctor draws blood or takes any human sample, there is a pretty good chance that sample will find its way to one of LabCorps labs. The Elon Lab is responsible for twenty percent of the testing that goes on within the company.
Being an international company, LabCorp decided that it would benefit them to start a logistic company to ship all of their test samples across the county and even the world. This means buying a fleet of trucks and planes that are capable of flying thousands of samples into the lab at night and picking them up for delivery by the next morning due to the importance of time when dealing with bodily fluids. LabCorp now owns a fleet of ten planes that each make around three trips a night to carry samples to and from the warehouse.
LabCorp decided that one way to stay ahead of their competitors and changing market conditions was to create a robotics company that created robots that could help them be more efficient. This allowed them to cut the amount of workers working on one factory floor from sixty to just six. They claim that the workers that they no longer need are working on jobs in which actual humans are needed. I found this to be good because it would be a shame if all of those workers were laid off of their position due to the robots.
LabCorps greatest competitor is Quest which is now the number two ranked lab in the world, leaving LabCorp at number one. Our tour guide mentioned that he only expects the size of LabCorp to increase in the near future, seeing as how Obamacare is projected to run many of the 5,000 small labs across the country out of business within the next few years. Everyone there seemed to be excited about the growth of the company.
LabCorp prides itself in its hierarchal structure where people can move up the corporate ladder so to speak. Our tour guide mentioned how experience and achievements were the major determining factor in deciding who does what at the lab and who is placed on each project. This allows them to be as efficient as possible and pass the savings on the the customer in the form of lower pieces for lab work. It is reasons like this that make me think that if I were in the science field, I would like to work for this company or one with a similar business model. They seem to make very ethical and profitable decisions.
It is easy to tell that the mission of LabCorp is to expand as much as possible while becoming more efficient than ever before. It is still very important to the company to make sure that the efficiency does not hurt the quality of their work. They understand that their customer or in this case, patients of health care providers, value their low prices and trusted results and diagnoses. The result of this is a happy customer base that keeps expanding while the company plans to keep growing and being an innovator in the health care field. Without companies like LabCorp, people would have to pay at least eight times more for a standard test due to it being done at a hospital and not a low cost facility.
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