Lab Spend is designed to work with how research labs commonly order products. Initially, a researcher requests a product, the product is visible in a dashboard that the entire lab can view, Lab Spend looks for savings, if we find savings you can purchase through Lab Spend or continue with your current vendor.
If you continue with the outside vendor (not Lab Spend) it’s referred to as an external order. This is because the order needs to be placed outside of the Lab Spend website. For example, if you request a printer from Amazon and we cannot find savings, you would need to go to Amazon and place the order directly. While we help with customer service for all our orders it can be difficult to monitor the status of each product from outside vendors. To help, Lab Spend has expanded the level of detail that you can communicate with your lab about an order.
Previously, you could provide two updates either enter back ordered dates or add tracking information. Now in the Order Status section of Lab Spend, you will see a new button called Status:
After clicking on the Status button, you can select Change Status, Split (more details below), Return, Cancel and Add Tracking. If clicked on, you can provide reasons why a product was returned or cancelled.
If you click on Change Status as indicated by the arrow above, you can change the status (image below) to Started, Placed (you’ve placed the order with the external vendor), Confirmed (vendor sent you a confirmation), Back ordered (you can add the estimated ship date), Shipped (can add tracking) and Received (you can add to your inventory from this point).
Split Feature:
Let’s say you order 10 cases of gloves and they have different status such as 3 are back ordered and 7 have been received (image below). The Split feature allows you to ‘split’ or divide the units and assign each lot its own status. This feature is flexible so that you can assign as many statuses as needed to each order.
In addition, you can add packing slips once shipments arrive. This update extends the ability of Lab Spend to monitor the status of ordered products and improve communication.
How can we help your lab run better? It’s a question we’re always asking! Today, we’re excited to announce a new feature called Spend Codes.
What are Spend Codes?
Spend Codes act as tags that you can assign to any product request or order to help track your spending. For example, you can use spend codes to track grant money or total spend for a specific project. You can also use Spend Codes to track purchase orders.
You can enable Spend Codes in your Settings:
At the bottom of the Settings page:
Spend Codes are represented by clickable green dollar signs:
After clicking, a Spend Code model will appear in which you can create, add, edit and deactivate the codes:
Add New Spend Code – Types of Codes and Duration
You can use Spend Codes based on Project ID, Grant ID, Fund ID, Requisition Number, or Purchase Order Number. You can make Spend Codes “Persistent” so they can be used over and over, or only permit “Single Use”.
Flexibility
You can attach as many Spend Codes as needed at the item and order level.
Why would you want to attach a code at the item level?
Let’s say you want to place a large single order with a vendor to save on shipping costs. The order contains 10 items, but needs to be split into 3 projects and 2 grants. This would be difficult if Spend Codes were only at the order level.
Below is an example from the order status section:
The orange arrow above highlights, if you hover over a Spend Code, a dialogue box will appear stating the Type and description details.
In the example above, you will see a spend codes at the item level and at the bottom middle the order level spend code (green arrow). As always, Lab Spend is free to use!
Inventory Monitoring for Bio-incubators and Accelerators
The landscape of research and development is rapidly changing. A relatively new concept are biotechnology incubators and accelerators. These facilities help usually smaller companies by providing lab space (more incubator) and services (more accelerator like). Bio-incubators play a critical role in supporting entrepreneurs who are developing new technology.
A bio-tech incubator has tenants that are small companies who order supplies that are needed for their research. A small biotechnology company may order 25 to 100 items per a month depending where they are in their purchasing cycle and type of research. If an incubator has 15 companies then they are looking 375 to 1,500 scientific supplies and chemicals entering the facility. Incubators have the challenge of being required to know when, what and how much of a product, which are often chemicals are being stored in their facility.
How do facilities best monitor and tracking the hundreds of items that are entering their buildings?
A problem with hundreds of items entering a facility isn’t new and is very similar to how university research labs function. A give science department may have fifteen professors who are each ordering items that enter a building. The solution that universities often use, is to hire a facilities manager often with a background in environment health and safety to assist labs with governmental compliance. For example, ensuring that labs have safety data sheets (SDSs) for the chemicals in their lab. The person may also review and maintain eye wash stations, trip hazards and help with waste management. However, hiring a dedicated facility manager is impractical with the budgets of many incubators. One solution has been to bring in a consultant to help set up systems that can then be run by the incubator staff. Another solution, which we have found more common is the owner of the facility hope all the tenants are compliant with rules and regulations without any monitoring. The scary part is that the facility itself could be held liable for fines such as by OSHA based on tenants actions. Of course, more importantly, there can be a significant safety risks such as storing in aggregate excessive volumes of flammable materials could pose to everyone in the facility. This scenario could happen if, for example, three companies are ordering ethanol and no one is monitoring of the total combined volume across the companies.
What solutions should biotech incubators consider?
To help, we at Lab Spend, have developed a facilities inventory feature. The software allows each research lab to monitor their own inventory providing an easy method to enter the chemical details, quantity, volumes and upload SDSs. This is important since compliance is more than having SDSs which is all that some incubators monitor. For example, there are specific regulations in Massachusetts where we are based about total flammable volumes within a facility and even by floor. Lab Spend allows you to easily combine volumes from multiple tenants and create customized exports.
The image below shows the dashboard of the items that are stored in the facility. The items can be refined by type such as if they are a chemical and filtered by locations and company.
Dashboard of Facility Level Inventory
The facility lab inventory feature should be viewed as a tool to help make the process of monitoring and reporting research supplies and chemicals. Those that manage incubator spaces will still need to monitor the system, for example, a tenant my forget to enter a chemical. However, Lab Spend is a massive improvement from the nearly impossible task of accurately monitoring items manually.
When developing the chemical inventory system in Lab Spend, we wanted to included GHS Pictograms. Uniquely, we allow GHS pictograms to be displayed next to each item to reduce the friction in finding looking them up in the safety data sheet (SDS).
Lab Spend allows users to look up the GHS Pictograms, enter them and then they can be viewed by everyone in the lab. When possible, we’re also making this task faster by autocompleting the GHS selections. In developing the software to automate this process, we’ve come across a number of interesting situations.
For example, let’s say a lab is buying a chemical from two different vendors, will the GHS pictograms be the same?
The answer is No. We see variations for the same chemical such as (-)-Nicotine Tartrate, CAS number 65-31-6 that is sold by both MilliporeSigma (Sigma-Aldrich), catalog number 1463304 and ThermoFisher Scientific under catalog number BP2533. Below is an image of the SDS, Version 5.0 from MilliporeSigma
Here is also Section 2 from the SDS, Version 4, but this time ThermoFisher:
As you may have already noticed, MilliporeSigma includes both the Acute Toxicity and Health Hazard while ThermoFisher has only the Acute Toxicity pictogram. We also looked at the percent of the product which may account for the difference, MilliporeSigma gives a range of 90-100% and ThermoFisher states >95% therefore these products can overlap in contents. If you search the NIH website by CAS 65-31-6 which is this chemical it returns four different pictograms:
Again it appears there are differences in pictograms for the same product. This isn’t an isolated case such as MilliporeSigma item 4-Hexylresorcinol, CAS Number: 136-77-6, section 2.2:
ThermoFisher offers this item with a different name, 4-n-Hexylresorcinol, but has the same CAS number.
As you can see MilliporeSigma has an Aquatic Toxicity pictogram while ThermoFisher only has the Warning pictogram. Lastly, item 2-Ethyl-2-oxazoline by MilliporeSigma has two pictograms while ThermoFisher has three.
ThermoFisher:
In this case, MilliporeSigma is missing the Corrosive pictogram.
Are pictograms optional?
Another issue you may not be aware of, is some GHS pictograms are optional in that the manufacturer has a choice of which pictogram to include. For example, Fisher Scientific sells 1,1-Di(tert-butylperoxy)cyclohexane, 50% solution in mineral oil (catalog numbers AC361310000; AC361310100; AC361312500) below is an image of section 2 of the SDS:
The top Hazard Statement corresponds to a H241 code, which is displayed below, you can see all the codes here on the NIH website.
Notice how the two GHS pictograms are shown this means that the vendor can chose either one! The vendor therefore can select explosive OR the flammable pictogram. The University of Nebraska actually mentions this exact example in their guide entitled, “ORGANIC PEROXIDES CHEMICAL HAZARDS & RISK MINIMIZATION”, which was brought to our attention by Kirk Hutchinson, who has been an excellent resource!
We see optional GHS pictograms as worrying because if a product is labeled as flammable it could also be explosive. A user of this product would not be able to tell by looking at the pictograms. It’s also concerning that SDSs for the same products are containing different pictograms. If you know why, we would be interested in hearing it!
Chemical Inventory: Item and Organizational Operations
Chemicals that are on a specific list, need to determine which apply to your organization and what type of information and/or data do you need to know and possibly extract about your inventory. This can be in the form of complying with specific items such as CFATS, volume related reporting such as Tier II, geography such as local or state requirements such as Prop 65 for the state of California, traits of the chemicals such as radioactive isotopes or communications such as if a chemical is hazardous and access to safety data sheets (SDSs).
Determine what regulations will apply to you and information that you need gather and report. In order to gather data it’s important to understand how the item moves throughout and interacts with your organization.
Product Movement
In short, we want to understand how an item is requested, tracked, arrives, placed in inventory, used and exits. Each organization differs, but here are details to consider in each of these steps.
Requests can be from companies (ordering) or from other labs both internal and external. What documents are need when items are arrive from an external lab?
Tracking after the request is made, who is responsible for ensuring the item arrives? How often should they monitor this process? How and with who should they communicate cancellations or delays?
Arrival, are items delivered to a loading dock, temporary inventory or directly to labs?
Who accepts packages? Does the package need to have a PO or other details to be accepted? How is the requestor notified that the item has arrived? Is this person responsible for looking for damages to the item, incorrect item or missing number of units?
Place item in inventory, does the lab record that the item has arrived? Does the item need to be barcoded, tagged or recorded? How are documents stored related to the item such as SDSs or user manuals?
Exit, how are items leaving your facility? What items can recycled or disposed of in normal trash? What items need special care such as sharps, bio-hazard or hazmat handling?
In general there are two broad examples, centralized which companies tend to follow and branched which is more popular in academics.
Centralized
Decentralized
Your particular system will likely be hybrid with certain parts being centralized (procurement and EHS) and others (ordering and item locations) branched. In universities it is common to have a more decentralized workflow with each lab ordering, tracking and monitoring their inventory. The labs may share a loading dock if their within the same building, but systems need to account for different workflows.
Organizational Workflow
Once we have a good grasp of how the item moves through the facility that will give us guidance on the human element such as departmental considerations:
Environmental Heath and Safety (EH&S) will be focused on regulatory aspects as mentioned, but also risk management. What hazards do you have on site, how to move gas cylinders properly, hazards that may develop such as peroxide formers or how much flammable liquids do you have on a given floor?
Research and Development may want to know location of products to know where items are located to streamline efficiency.
Manufacturing can be concerned with on site inventory to maintain production levels.
Procurement has an interest in idle inventory, duplicate orders, pricing and better value in both price and service.
There are more examples, but the underlying consideration is who will need to access the inventory system and what information needs to be entered and extracted from it.
Scope
Do all departments and their stakeholders need to be involved for a comprehensive solution? Is it for one lab, building, institution wide? What is the scope of implementation such as number of chemicals and to how handle different facilities?
How are we going to manage kits, propriety solutions and creating compounds? Do we need to inventory all chemicals or only HAZMAT items?
Roles and Responsibilities
Who is doing what?
Compliance, who is responsible with entering the data, less people makes this process much easier. How often will audits be done to ensure the inventory is accurate?
Permissions, who can view, edit and extract data from the system and which parts? Who is in charge of assigning permissions?
Software and Tools
The exciting part and often where companies start, please don’t start here, try to get a plan together first. It will help you determine what type of software and tools that you need.
Functionality, does it meet your goals, can it generate the reports that you need, how easy does it do it? Example of easy of use, how many times do I need to enter data? Pricing model, does it fit your budget, is it per a month, based on number of items? Is the company more focused on software or consulting? How much support will you get?
Is there a hardware component, do you need a scanner, barcode printer, can the hardware and software interact well, you don’t want to have a scanner and printer that can’t communicate or with the software system.
Is there software flexible to expand easily such as if another department wants to add it or a stockroom? What’s the roll out? How do people get trained to use the software and hardware?
Launching the Chemical Inventory
Develop a chemical inventory plan (tip: make this document user friendly so it can used as a reference for new users)
Distribute and train applicable stack holders and notify of launch date. Especially in more decentralized organizations such as universities it’s important to let professors know if they should be gathering data or someone will need access to their lab.
Plan to handle existing inventory, does it need to be barcoded? Who will handle the initial data entry? It is important to have an accurate starting point and keep in mind, the time and effort it can take to get this data entered.
Implementation, what is the start date? How will incoming items be distributed and removed from the system?
Maintenance
Quality control and reconciliation to spot check data and reports for accuracy, errors will occur (item isn’t barcoded, item moved and not reported, etc.) worst case perform on an annual basis. Who does these audits, EH&S? What will be checked and what is the criteria?
Updating new locations and employees as they come and go, how are we going to migrate chemicals to a new location? How will employees enter and exit the inventory system and who is responsible for that transition?
We’ve talked with hundreds of labs about their inventory needs and even built a software solution called Lab Spend, we’d be happy to give you a demo.
When consulting with biotech companies they’re often considering a variety of ways to save money and operate more efficiently. Here are five points to consider when trying to improve both:
Price Benchmarking
It’s important to select items for improved pricing when there’s margin to do so for the supplier or they’ll just decline. Also it’s critical to preserve supplier and vendor relationships and to make reasonable requests. You can certainly fatigue vendors by requesting quotes on the wrong items. It matters since sales reps will often prioritize quotes and customer service to reasonable clients. We help identify these items by analyzing the spend and if the price is high compared to peers. Currently, we’ve collected over 1 billion dollars of purchasing data, which allows us to provide unique insights.
Often companies mistakenly take their top ten highest spend items and request quotes on those repeatedly. It may work great the first couple of times, but long term the results stagnant. Usually companies have already done this when we talk with about pricing, which is fine, but long term it is better to be strategically selective.
Inventory Analysis
If you have an accurate inventory system in place then this analysis is made much easier. Often our clients don’t have a system that monitors their inventory. We work them to help develop solutions so that they can better track how items are moving through their companies. If you don’t have that option to examine your inventory, pick a date and from that point forward monitor what is being ordered. This will allow you to determine what items are being used and at what rate. We often find that inventories have products that are essentially taking up space and have been in the inventory for more than one year. When picking a date, start at least two years previous as it can help identify items that are never ordered again. It could be that these items have been used and are no longer needed, but often these products are sitting in inventory. At large companies this can represent millions of dollars and additional risk as products approach their expiration dates.
Shipping Costs
In addition, you can often reduce shipping costs as you begin to understand how products are being utilized. This reduction can come from ordering in large volumes and improve combinations of products. For large volumes consider both the size and number of units, for example, Fisher Scientific sells 6 x 500g of a product instead of ordering 1x. For combinations the significant savings can be found in items that require HAZMAT and overnight shipping such as enzymes. You can add a lot of value by ordering many of these items together as shipping can be $85 plus for overnight and fees (ice pack, special handing, dry ice, etc.).
Equivalent Products
Often commonly used chemicals and supplies there will be multiple vendors that can supply an equivalent product. If you’ve benchmarked your prices as mentioned above, you should have a list of targets. While it is worthwhile to approach existing vendors also consider alternatives sources. You can find these by search and asking other researchers. We spent a significant amount of time research and creating a database of more than 100,000 for scientific supplies and chemicals. It may not always be an option to change, but we’ve repeatedly found significant savings (over 65% on >25k annual spends) using this approach.
Contract Pricing Errors
A common type of error is that companies are being charged list price instead of the contract price. We’ve helped clients by cleaning their data so that they can easily identify the errors. The cleaning is the tedious but the savings falls instantly to the bottom line. After cleaning the data, simply sort by catalog number and price to find outliers. If you’re contract is for a significant percentage off of list price then the anomalies will easily stand out.
Another type of error which is more subtle is pricing increasing when you log into your account. For example, the list price for item is $175.91 and when you log into your account that price increases to $183.12.
Conclusion
If you’re able to apply these five methods mentioned you should be able to save 15% or more on your scientific supplies, equipment and chemicals. Often procurement departments have limited resources and if we had to pick one method it would to do price benchmarking.
Yes, the trend is that universities have better prices than companies as our previous post shows. However, it does vary by universities and company and even at the item level. In the table below, we’re modeling what major companies and universities are paying for a commonly used research product. The table below is displaying the current price for acetone, 4L, ACS grade, each.
Name
Price
Description
Free Shipping
Sanofi
16.07
Large Company
No
UCSF
18.72
University
Yes
Penn State Univ.
22.18
University
Yes
BASF
26.33
Large Company
No
USC (CA)
29.48
University
Yes
Arizona State Univ.
34.79
University
No
Mass General Hospital
36.80
University
Yes
Heliotrope Technologies
139.63
Small Company
No
Companies and universities that are ordering solvents often order in bulk to reduce shipping costs. The following data is for acetone, 4x4L, ACS Grade.
Name
Price
Description
Free Shipping
Boston University
67.50
University
Yes
Celerion
76.64
Large Company
No
Novartis
78.33
Large Company
Yes
Lubrizol
79.21
Large Company
No
Berkeley
81.15
University
Yes
Northwestern University
83.02
University
Yes
Auburn University
86.00
University
Yes
Oregon State Univ.
90.81
University
Yes
Procter & Gamble
92.23
University
Yes
Miami University
92.23
University
Yes
University of Oklahoma
95.28
University
Yes
Austin Community College
96.77
University
Yes
Rice University
96.77
University
Yes
Bio-Rad
97.66
Large Company
No
Harvard University
99.09
University
Yes
DPX Labs
124.07
Small Company
No
Solvay
129.68
Large Company
Yes
Elevance Renewable Sciences
140.26
Small Company
No
Rive Technology
202.94
Small Company
Yes
Chemtall
214.85
Small Company
Yes
We commonly see a 2-4x difference between companies purchasing the exact same product. In the example, it is about 4.5x difference between the lowest and highest paying customer, which is considerable. The difference is about 3.8x for companies with a small company having the best pricing.
Want to give us feedback, need more details or contribute pricing? Please email us at support@labspend.com. Also if you want to see how your pricing compares to others, sign up for free at Lab Spend and use our free pricing engine search tool.
Are university prices lower than companies on research products?
Yes, the trend is that universities have better prices than companies. However, it does vary by universities and company and even at the item level. In the table below, we’re modeling what major companies and universities are paying for a commonly used research product. The table below is displaying the current price for UltraSense™ Powder-Free Nitrile Gloves by Microflex for the case size.
Company
Price
Description
Cal Tech.
61.82
University
UCSF
66.99
University
UCSC
67.02
University
Berkeley
67.02
University
Duke Univ.
67.50
University
Texas A&M University
68.58
University
Harvard University
70.34
University
Univ. of Utah
72.18
University
Scripps
72.80
University
Cornell University
73.57
University
Univ. of WI, Madison
73.85
University
Hygieia Biological Lab
76.11
Small Company
North Dakota State Univ.
77.35
University
UCSD
77.56
University
USC (CA)
78.49
University
Hologic
80.10
Large Company
Connecticut College
80.18
Small University
Univ. of Nevada Reno
80.18
University
Univ. of Colorado
80.52
University
Univ. of New Mexico
81.56
University
Auburn University
82.61
University
Genentech
83.93
Large Company
Roche Diagnostics
83.98
Large Company
Univ. of Iowa
84.39
University
Monsanto
84.40
Large Company
Quidel Corporation
85.03
Large Company
Northwestern Univ.
85.14
University
University of Arizona
86.19
Large University
Genzyme
88.30
Large Company
Louisiana State Univ.
88.41
University
Univ. of Minnesota
88.51
University
BASF
89.36
Large Company
Access Genetics
89.36
Small Company
Austin Community College
92.42
Small University
Tolmar Pharmaceuticals
94.82
Medium Company
Trilogy Analytical Laboratory
109.33
Small Company
Beckman Coulter
111.63
Large Company
Emory University
120.06
University
Aurora Algae
127.55
Small Company
BioMarin
127.55
Large Company
Sutro Biopharma
127.57
Large Company
Johnson & Johnson
139.68
Large Company
Becton Dickinson
140.91
Large Company
Icahn School of Med. at Mt. Sinai
143.91
University
Mylan Pharmaceuticals
144.77
Medium Company
Procter & Gamble
145.95
Large Company
University of Oklahoma
153.16
University
University of Kentucky
156.48
University
Anoka Ramsey Community College
160.52
Small University
Husson University
160.52
Small University
Temple Univ.
160.52
University
Norchem Corporation
165.28
Medium Company
Acceleron Pharma
172.61
Large Company
Regeneron Pharma
181.87
Large Company
Abbvie
185.26
Large Company
Hollister Incorporated
187.87
Large Company
Equitech Bio Inc.
191.46
Small Company
Oklahoma State Univ.
193.38
University
IBM
206.06
Large Company
GEI Consulting
241.07
Small Company
Biofire Defense
252.06
Small Company
Tangen Bioscience
288.41
Small Company
Teledyne ISCO
288.41
Medium Company
We defined company size as small for under 100, medium 100-1,000 and great than 1,000 employees as large. Our goal is to keep these prices within 2% of the current price (last updated 8/14/2019).
We commonly see a 2-4x difference between companies purchasing the exact same product. In the example, it is about 4.5x difference between the lowest and highest paying customer, which is considerable. The difference is about 3.8x for companies with a small company having the best pricing.
Want to give us feedback, need more details or contribute pricing? Please email us at support@labspend.com. Also if you want to see how your pricing compares to others, sign up for free at Lab Spend and use our free pricing engine search tool.
Think you’re getting the best price on VWR and Fisher Scientific? Think again.
We all love scientific suppliers, and for good reason: these companies sell almost everything. Despite these companies being dominate in supplying researchers, it’s easy to assume that you’re always getting the best price – but that’s often not the case. Yes, we know about your start-up, moving, academic, bulk, special birthday quote, awesome promo discount, but you’re likely overpaying. Luckily, there’s an easy way to outsmart the marketplace and get better pricing.
Recommended by Lab Manager magazine, this genius website has gained popularity among researchers for its pricing search engine tool. It can save you tons of money. And, yes, it can show you savings even if you have special pricing!
It’s easy to use, just enter a catalog number and pricing histogram appears:
Now you know if you’re overpaying! If so, ask your sales rep for quote, shop around, Lab Spend will even give you quotes automatically and get a fair price.
The next time you shop on Fisher or VWR, check Lab Spend to know ensure you help you get the lowest price possible. In seconds, you have a better idea of the market price that can save you thousands. And here’s the best part: Fisher Scientific and VWR are just the beginning! Lab Spend also accepts manufacturer catalog numbers so you can save on everything from gloves to freezers.
Fisher Scientific, VWR and Sigma-Aldrich (now MilliporeSigma) are the three commonly used suppliers to scientific research labs. Researchers will often compare the prices between these brands while making their purchasing decisions. All of these companies offer unique products, but many are essentially commodities. For commodity items, pricing can be a major factorin deciding who to buy from although quality and lead time should also be considerations.
At Lab Spend, we’re focused on helping researchers and procurement departments make informed purchasing decisions. However, let’s for a moment view the marketplace from a supplier perspective.
What companies are researchers buying from?
Fisher Scientific, VWR and MilliporeSigma comprise the majority of sales so we will be focusing on them in this post. All three major suppliers have extensive catalogs and therefore are able to offer many products that labs are looking to purchase.
Next, let’s look at what researchers are buying at a Midwest university. For the past four years, Fisher Scientific has had and continues to hold the largest sales volume as shown by the pie charts below:
Let’s next take a look at the past four years of sales to see if there’s variation. Fisher Scientific has had the majority of sales for the past four years, but it did decline in 2018. This was due to an increase in sales by VWR, which has tripled in the past two years. MilliporeSigma has remained consistent over the four year period.
What are the top selling items?
Let’s next look at what are the items that are driving the revenue leaving out those that are not accurately cataloged or a detailed item description was lacking. The most popular item for the past four years is gloves comprising 21% of all sales. It’s interesting to note that Fisher Scientific and VWR have almost equal share with Fisher having the slight majority at 51%. For Fisher Scientific, the top selling glove and product is Kimberly Clark Lavender™ Nitrile Exam Gloves at $145 per a case.
The next significant type of products generating sales were solvents followed by 2018 pricing.
Supplier
Solvent
Catalog Number
Size
Pack
Price
Fisher
Acetone
A18-200
200L
EA
$562.78
Fisher
Methylene Chloride
D37-20
20L
EA
$112.79
Fisher
Acetonitrile
A998-4
4L
CS
$210.24
Fisher
Hexanes
H292-20
20L
EA
$52.17
The top selling product from VWR was also gloves with their private label Soft Nitrile Examination Gloves catalog number 89038-270 for $48.95 per a case and related depending on the size. Next for VWR was also solvents, Acetonitrile, EM-AX0145-1, CS with that varied around $200, N,N-Dimethylformamide, BDH1117-4LG, CS for $319.22.
The best sellers for MilliporeSigma were Amicon filters, Ultra-0.5 Centrifugal Filter Unit catalog numbers UFC500396, UFC900324 and UFC901024 comprised about 16% of their total yearly sales. Amicon filters are made by MilliporeSigma, but Fisher Scientific offered them at a better price. We work with labs helping them comparison shop and this just another example to keep an eye out, just because you are ordering from the manufacturer you can still be overpaying. The number of unique catalog numbers sold from Fisher Scientific, VWR and MilliporeSigma were about 2500, 350 and 500 respectively. We found it interesting that VWR had about double the sales as MilliporeSigma spread over fewer items.
Who is offering a better price for the exact same item?
In 2018, researchers bought item 431161 from Corning, Disposable Sterile Bottle-Top Filters with 0.22µm Membrane and Corning item 95301, Melting Point Capillaries.
Supplier
Cat. Number
Price
Pack
Manuf.
Man. Cat. Number
VWR
29442-952
$209.35
CS
Corning
431161
Fisher
09-761-126
$258.02
CS
Corning
431161
VWR
32311-080
$203.99
CS
Corning
95301
Fisher
08-261-2A
$181.20
CS
Corning
95301
Despite being better priced VWR was outsold by Fisher for item 431161. As a note, Corning item 431161 is priced reasonably, but item 95301 could be better based on our analysis of other universities and companies.
Let’s look at 2019 prices. Fisher Scientific and VWR both offer Kimberly Clark item 34155 (Fisher Catalog number 06666A and VWR catalog number 21905-026 by the case. Fisher Scientific is offering it for $143.20 while VWR offers it at $112.06, which represents about a 28% savings for the exact same item. For the past fours years, VWR has been better priced, but Fisher has sold about 6x the amount of product. For an actionable step, VWR should consider letting more labs know about this item since it is commonly used.
To address the initial question, you need to compare at the item level for savings. As the example shows, Fisher Scientific and VWR both offer Corning products and depending on the item have a better price.
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