Running a research lab is a lot like managing a small business. Although there’s a lot more glory in getting grants than saving money, it’s important to keep an eye on expenditures. Lab shopping is one area where savings can be found such as on supplies, equipment and chemicals. Below are methods that you can use to stretch your funding that much more:
1) Get quotes from multiple vendors and not just 2-3 of large distributors
2) Ask other labs which vendors they buy from and introductions to their sales representatives
3) Search online for chemistry (your field of choice) stockrooms as some do list pricing
3) If applicable, suppliers may have new lab or moving discounts
4) Recycle quotes, take your best pricing and see if the original quotes can be improved
5) Cross reference products, check for different names which can vary by manufacturer
6) Keep an eye out for special promotions
7) Track prices as they do change and what you buy for possible bulk discounts
Lab Spend sends quote requests to multiple sales representative and manufactures automatically. While asking other labs does help, we’ve also gathered more than 4 billion dollars of pricing information searchable. If you want to gather some of that pricing directly as example, see the NASPO Valuepoint contract (VWR and Fisher Scientific). You then need to categorize the product of interest and apply the appropriate discount from list price.
Online searching for pricing especially of stockrooms can be worthwhile for example, here is the website of the chemistry stock at the
Kansas State University. The goal is together enough information to know that they quotes you are getting back are reasonable. We’ve combined sources like these and if there’s enough data display a distribution of prices. It is common to see a 3-4x difference in price for the exact same item.
More to come on cross referencing, but be careful of the number of units for a given product. For example, manufactures such
Cell Treat,
Genesee Scientific,
VWR and
Fisher Scientific all offer 25ml individually wrapped serological pipettes as 200 per a case, but
Denville Scientific offers them at 100 per a case. Chemicals are bit a easier to cross reference as their standards for comparing such as CAS or MDL numbers. The problem is that it can be very time consuming to search cross dozens of sites to see if they offer the product, is it in stock, purity and sizes available. We created a search engine to help with this problem much like how Kayak helps when comparing flights. You can search by CAS number against more than 100 companies in the USA and then filter by size, sort by price, etc.
Tracking what your lab spends is very helpful as it can tell you what products to focus on to maximize savings. We’ve built a free tool in Lab Spend to help you keep track. Although many sales representatives like to request annual purchase volume our data shows that it doesn’t matter. In other words, we are not seeing a correlation between volume purchased of a particular item by a lab and final pricing. If you get push back on this, ask the sales rep of a price breakdown by volume and watch as you don’t get a clear response.
We’ve helped start up labs to top 10 pharma companies with their lab shopping and see the reoccurring problem of labs thinking they are getting a good price if it is 20% from list. When attaining quotes or developing contracts with major scientific distributors attain the actual price list. A percent off of list price is a bad idea since those prices don’t accurately reflect the market price and can be changed. It’s not very helpful to be getting 65% off of list price and then the price without warning goes up 100%.