This article was originally posted on our LinkedIn
It’s a gorgeous Friday afternoon, the perfect day to finish your experiments before the weekend. Your centrifuge, freezers and incubators have recently been PM’d and your last run went flawlessly. You casually glide back to your bench and begin to look frantically around, where are they?
The tubes, the caps and the filters are all…GONE!
You double check the boxes you saw on the shelves but they are all empty (typical tech move). Barren drawers stare back at you, except for the last box of tubes from Conical Kingdom USA alongside some filters from May-B-Sterile LLC.
This simply won’t do.
Now your manager is upset, the company is upset, and this situation will live rent free in that expensive PhD brain of yours over the weekend.
Consumables are underrated in the laboratory environment, especially in lean labs. Usually, it’s all about that fancy new floor model centrifuge with a touchscreen, bluetooth, and the ability to spin at two million rpm per millisecond (really increases the throughput).
Or maybe the super mega capacity Ultra low freezer you can bury even more unlabeled racks in the back of.
However, if you don’t have tubes, the centrifuge and freezer are simply outrageously large paper weights.
Sometimes the centrifuge or freezers are at fault for halting an experiment, but more often than not, it’s the consumables. Taken for granted and left in the cold, one missing box of tubes can delay a full experiment, and with the lead times these days this could drastically affect the timeline.
Consumables are like break room snacks, full in the morning, empty by lunch.
You can plan a PM for your equipment, but you can’t plan for the tech who grabbed the last box of 1.5mL tubes without letting operations know to order more. This is where the real bottleneck lives, not the machines but the short lived, poorly supported supplies.
A four cent consumable shouldn’t derail a four hour experiment but to the dismay of lean labs, this happens many times throughout the year.
Since the events of 2020, the logistics of distribution and manufacturing has been frail, especially in the scientific supply industry.
This Forbes article noted that up to 94% of companies were experiencing supply shortages due to the pandemic (though not specifically science related).
It was around that time when people began seeing 3-5 day lead times turn into 3-5 weeks, sometimes months and maybe longer if you were in need of a high priority consumable. Most of this breakage can be attributed to the massive increase in demand for testing supplies, which included the standard tips and tubes.
However, some of this can be attributed to those dinosaur systems most big distribution companies are built on. Typically, manufacturers run more smoothly in this regard, such as Biotix who has a great inventory tracking system and very smooth website. Distributors though, are still not up to speed as much of their capital is tied up in inventory and not spent updating outdated systems.
Overall, consumables have shorter lifecycles than equipment but what are manufacturers and distributors doing to correct the annoying stocking and shipping issues that continue to plague the industry?
When thinking of the perfect consumables purchasing ecosystem, this is what we think of:
This is the dream. No reps reaching out after the fact because the outdated systems don’t update inventory until the end of the day (and you purchased after they sold out earlier that day). Full transparency for labs of any size, and fast fulfillment of the services and products you were promised.
This is our dream for Saguaro Scientific, and what we are working to build.
B2B enjoys purchase orders and Net terms, not credit card fees and a clunky website. This is often the reason supply websites are sometimes not up to date or “vague” regarding the shipment of your products.
Big companies like to call a rep and order, not mess around with a website. But guess who is exposed to the credit card fees and use of the clunky website? The small labs.
Needless to say, this isn’t great for those who need to find products quickly, order and receive them fast. This is one of the areas Saguaro Scientific is starting to shine.
We have worked tirelessly to implement live rates to the best of our ability, and provide unique checkout options. An option to Pay via PO, and “Use Your Own Account” for shipping costs are listed plainly on the checkout, something you will not find through traditional channels.
We are building Saguaro Scientific specifically due to the bottleneck I noticed in the southwest. The market is exploding with new potential, but many of these labs are being overlooked because their order sizes aren’t big enough to earn discounts or waived fees.
Even with this growth, most distributors and manufacturers still offer slow delivery and extended lead times here, and they don’t want to deal with orders of just two or three small packs of tubes. This is where we shine. Our website is built to support small labs.
Long term our dream is to bring full consumables manufacturing to Arizona and offer same day shipping for pennies via our own fleet but for now, we operate lean so we can support other lean companies.
Pricing fairly and shipping in quantities that won’t overwhelm your area while growing alongside our partners is what we aim for. The goal remains the same: ensure a four cent consumable doesn’t bring thousand dollar workflows to a halt.
Consumables should support your equipment, not sabotage your workflow.