Large animal veterinarians are used to thinking in terms of workload: more calls, more emergencies, more records and more pressure squeezed into the same number of hours.
But what if part of the strain in bovine practice is not simply the amount of work being done — but the amount of friction surrounding it?
The veterinarian who walks back to the truck three times during a dystocia because supplies are disorganized. The herd check that runs an hour behind because treatment records are incomplete. The producer who calls back confused because treatment instructions were inconsistent. The repeated after-hours emergencies tied to the same preventable breakdowns.
A growing number of industries have begun looking at those frustrations through the lens of lean thinking, a management philosophy that originated within the Toyota Production System and has since expanded into health care, manufacturing and agriculture.
Speaking on lean management in dairy systems, Yana Hocken, a consultant and dairy farmer from New Zealand, argued many operational problems are not caused by people failing, but by systems failing the people expected to work within them.
Look for Waste in Everyday Veterinary Work
Lean thinking centers center around identifying “waste” — activities that consume time, energy or resources without adding meaningful value.
In bovine veterinary medicine, many of those inefficiencies are deeply familiar:
- Repeated trips back to the truck for forgotten supplies
- Searching for medications in cluttered drawers
- Duplicate data entry
- Poorly grouped farm calls that add unnecessary driving
- Waiting for cattle to be brought up
- Rechecks caused by inconsistent treatment instructions
“Anything we’re doing that’s not adding value to our product or our customer is essentially wasting our time, our resources, our cost, and it’s getting in the way of us focusing on things that matter,” Hocken says.
Individually, many of these inefficiencies seem small. Together, they quietly consume hours every week while adding cognitive load and frustration.
The encouraging part is that many lean improvements are also small. None of the changes require new technology or major investment, but collectively they can reduce interruptions, delays and mental fatigue.
Importantly, lean systems are not intended to push you to simply work faster. The philosophy instead focuses on reducing unnecessary work so teams can focus on the work that actually matters.
Standardization Can Reduce Decision Fatigue
Standardization reduces mental fatigue by minimizing the number of repetitive decisions teams make throughout the day.
In practice, that could look like:
- Every veterinary truck organized identically
- Standardized fresh cow exam workflows
- Uniform mastitis treatment protocols
- Consistent record-keeping templates
- Shared client handouts for common conditions
“We’re trying to create simple processes to make them accurate, effective and ensure that we can keep really high standards,” Hocken says.
Even small adjustments can have measurable effects.
If every veterinarian stores IV catheters, sleeves and OB chains in different places, technicians and associates lose time searching during stressful situations. If treatment records are entered differently by each doctor, follow-up communication becomes harder. If calf protocols vary from producer to producer without documentation, repeat explanations become inevitable.
Standardization does not eliminate clinical judgment. Instead, it creates consistency around routine parts of practice so mental energy can be reserved for the cases that truly require it.
Predictable systems can also reduce onboarding stress and improve confidence during busy periods.
The Veterinary Truck Is a Lean System Waiting to Happen
Hocken suggests using workplace organization systems to ensure “everything is in its place and everyone knows exactly where things are.”
For livestock veterinarians, the truck may be one of the clearest opportunities for improvement.
Practical lean changes could include:
- Color-coding emergency kits
- Assigning dedicated locations for commonly used drugs
- Labeling drawers clearly
- Creating restocking checklists
- Standardizing inventory across associates
These systems reduce wasted motion and stress during emergencies.
If you’re responding to a toxic mastitis case at 2 a.m. you should not have to think about where calcium, fluids or catheters are stored.
Similarly, clinics can examine how often veterinarians are interrupted by missing inventory, expired medications, incomplete records or unclear scheduling.
Lean thinking asks a simple question repeatedly: What problems happen over and over again — and why are they still happening?
Better Systems Often Create Better Communication
Hocken argues management systems often determine team performance more than individual personality or motivation.
“It is the systems and the processes that you put in place that enable you to have a high-performing team,” she says.
A disorganized practice environment can make even strong employees struggle, while well-designed systems help teams perform more consistently.
Lean philosophy places heavy emphasis on communication, transparency and employee involvement in problem-solving. Hocken stresses sustainable improvement depends on engagement from the people actually doing the work.
“You can’t create a sustainable change and you can’t create a sustainable continuous improvement that you need if you don’t have the people engagement,” she says.
In practice, that may mean asking technicians where delays happen most often, reviewing recurring client communication breakdowns, involving younger associates in workflow redesign or holding short weekly meetings focused specifically on operational frustrations.
It’s common for teams to normalize inefficiency simply because they have worked around it for years. Lean thinking encourages teams to stop treating recurring frustrations as inevitable.
What Dairy Systems May Already Be Teaching Veterinarians
Although lean management originated outside agriculture, many bovine veterinarians already work within highly systematized environments. Dairy production routinely relies on treatment protocols, reproduction metrics, transition cow monitoring, calf health programs and visual tracking systems.
Hocken recently redesigned the dry-off process on her dairy operation, reducing labor time while improving udder health outcomes. She also ties operational consistency back to animal welfare.
“We consider our animals as athletes,” she says.
That framing may resonate strongly with those involved in preventive medicine and production-focused consulting work. Rather than viewing efficiency and welfare as competing priorities, lean philosophy argues well-designed systems can improve both simultaneously.
“If we do a really great job looking after our animals, looking after our people and looking after our environment, we will be able to have a successful business,” Hocken says.
Better systems are not only about profitability. They can also support calmer workdays, clearer communication, fewer preventable mistakes, improved client consistency and lower stress for veterinary teams.
A Different Burnout Conversation
Burnout in veterinary medicine is often discussed in terms of emotional resilience, staffing shortages or workload intensity. Those pressures are real and unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Lean thinking does not promise an easier profession. It cannot eliminate emergencies, labor shortages or the emotional demands of veterinary medicine. What it does suggest is that some exhaustion may stem not from the medicine itself, but from the preventable inefficiencies surrounding it.
Small improvements rarely feel transformational in the moment, but over time, removing repeated friction from a workday may matter more than many veterinarians realize.
