At Lab Spend the majority of labs we talk with are moving away from whiteboards and spreadsheets for their lab management and inventory needs. However, some labs are using competing products such as Quartzy. If you’re a current Quartzy user, we encourage you to sign-up and schedule a demo of Lab Spend. During the demo, we will compare the features and usability of the two software systems.
Lab Spend is the leading Quartzy competitor. Lab Spend has additional features (spend analytics, pricing search engine, chemical search engine, etc.) compared to Quartzy, but also overlap in helping labs with lab management and inventory. We often transfer labs and company accounts from Quartzy to Lab Spend. The goal of this post is to answer common questions labs have about moving from Quartzy to Lab Spend.
Do you offer help moving data from Quartzy to Lab Spend?
Yes, we will help the transfer process.
What’s the best way to help with the transfer?
Exporting your data from Quartzy can be done within your account. To export your inventory, you can follow these instructions and for requests, here.
Is the transfer from process automated?
No, existing data from Quartzy is usually very dirty and needs to be manually cleaned. We can help with this process, but your team may want to help as well if you have many items in your inventory or need to move from Quartzy quickly.
How long does the transfer process take?
We often transfer labs from Quartzy to Lab Spend within a week although it depends on how many items are in your inventory and if you need requests moved as well. At times, our data team can be at full capacity due to moving other labs, which means it could be longer than a week. We’re happy to provide guidance during a demo.
Is it easy for researchers to learn Lab Spend if they’ve been using Quartzy?
Yes, the basic concept is the same in that researchers request items and their status can be tracked into an inventory system.
How do I set up a demo with Lab Spend?
You can sign up at the Lab Spend website and we will schedule a demo. During the demo, we can also answer questions that are not covered in this post.
We make free lab inventory software and are considering offering Bluetooth stickers as a better way to monitor lab inventory. This type of product doesn’t exist so we are reaching out to get feedback and see if there’s interest.
The benefit to labs would be massive time savings since it would essentially eliminate barcoding, scanning, quantity tracking and reconciliation tasks. Just instant updates through the phone in your pocket. The stickers are small and flexible enough to be placed on the majority of items.
Bluetooth Sticker Technical Details:
10m range (30 feet) in the lab
12 month battery life
Water resistant
Flexible (fits around the head of a wine bottle, testing is tough sometimes)
Size of an Avery barcode label (~9 x 77 mm and 0.5mm thick or 1.1 x 3 inches and 0.2 inches thick), image below for a size reference
We are targeting a price point of $2 per a sticker and production would be in about 8 to 12 weeks depending on the response. The initial production would be for 25,000 units and are asking if your lab or your stockroom wants an allocation. Labs commonly have 500 to 1,000 items therefore we need about 50 labs that are interested.
We initially emailed this request to current Lab Spend users and the response has been great! Here are some FAQs so far:
Why not NFC or RFIDs instead of Bluetooth?
The range of NFC and RFIDs is about the same distance as scanning barcodes. We’d like to inventory all the items in a room just by standing in the room.
Do the Bluetooth stickers interfere with each other?
No, we’ve tested over 1,400 stickers in close proximity.
If Bluetooth stickers are of interest, please send us an email to support@labspend.com
Benefits of an Integrated Procurement and Inventory System
Integrating your procurement, inventory and safety data sheets (SDSs) management systems offers significant advantages over using separate, discrete systems. In this post we highlight the reasons and how using Lab Spend increase lab efficency.
Lab Spend is an integrated system which begins by requesting a product at the top of the work cycle shown in the figure below:
From the first step of Request Product, Lab Spend begins auto-completing data to save you time (more details here). The centralized dashboard allows all members to view requests and orders. Once an item is received, it is placed into your inventory. SDS files can be attached to each item in your inventory keeping the system in sync. Products are used and once depleted, a simple click requests the product again.
The figure below shows examples of different discrete systems that research labs use prior to implementing an integrated system:
Biotechnology companies using discrete systems require a manual process to move data between systems since they’re not designed to work together.
The manual process of emailing updates costs time and communication such as status updates is often implemented inconsistently. For example, a lab manager may be trying to keep track of hundreds of items with various status (back-ordered, returned, item missing, item damaged, etc.) and then trying to communicate that to dozens of researchers is a difficult system to maintain. Often the lab manager is unable to monitor theses status and is only able to provide updates when requested by researchers. If a researcher is requesting an update is inefficient and if there is a problem it can be difficult to correct quickly such as being made aware that a critical product will be arriving weeks later than expected.
Moving along in the cycle once an item arrives it is placed into the inventory system often Excel. Since Excel doesn’t easily handle file storage, labs may use a shared DropBox folder for their SDSs, but these two systems don’t automatically synchronize causing them to drift apart over time. Since the inventory and SDSs drift apart it causes inaccuracies making the lab at risk for safety violations.
In Summary:
Integrated Lab Management Systems:
Synchronized data
Reduced data entry, therefore, reducing errors
A seamless transition between placing Product Requests, Orders, Status Updates, Receiving into Inventory, and re-Ordering
Specialized notifications and emails such as for low stock levels, service reminders or chemical expirations
Discrete Lab Management Systems:
Labor-intensive processes
Hard to manage through email
No synchronization between systems
Increased safety violations due to management difficulty
Increasing the requirement for manual inventory checks
Time-consuming to determine if all SDSs are on site
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!
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.
Entering and updating the data your lab inventory is a tedious process.
Lab Spend can now autofill millions of inventory fields. Simply start entering your item details as usual. If there’s an item match in the Lab Spend system, you have the option of selecting to have the information autofilled.
Here’s an example from product requests, you will see an item selection as you type and once selected item fields will be populated:
You have better things to do than inventory data entry and we’re excited to help!
Need an alternative to Quartzy? Today’s lab managers are utilizing lab management and inventory software to help their labs running smoothly. Lab management software has numerous benefits compared to traditionally tracking tasks by hand or using Excel. In this post, we help you decide between Quartzy and Lab Spend for lab management.
Business Model
Feature Description
Quartzy
Lab Spend
Starting Price
Free
Free
Paid Features
$$$
None, complete access
Business Model
Distributor
Distributor
Product Prices
Yes
Save ~15% (see below)
Additional Shipment Fees
Yes
No
Personal Customer Service Rep.
No
Yes
Products and Brands for Sale
Many
Many More
-Access to Sigma Aldrich
Yes
Yes
-Access to VWR
No
Yes
-Access to Fisher Scientific
No
Yes
-Access to Thomas Scientific
No
Yes
How is Lab Spend able to save labs money compared to Quartzy?
The two main methods are that Lab Spend does not warehouse the products. This reduces the costs associated with renting or buying a warehouse along with the staff to process shipments. We also ship directly from manufacturers to your lab reducing shipping costs (direct instead of the manufacturer to warehouse to you). Finally, by shipping direct, we reduce a point of possible errors, for example, wrong sized items or not enough units along with maintaining product quality since products may not be stored correctly or compromised in transit.
Lab Management
Feature Description
Quartzy
Lab Spend
Permission Levels
Two
Seven
Single View Layout
No
Yes
Spend Codes
Basic
Advanced
Lab Spend shows all your management in a single screen instead of multiple so you don’t have to click back and forth to find out the status of an item. Quartzy uses only two permission levels which are admin and normal user. However, lab management software needs to be flexible so handle many types of use cases. For example in an academic setting you many want to undergraduates to be able to view the site, but not order. You may want only one graduate student to be able to order. Lab Spend has seven different permission settings that can be mixed and matched to help your lab run smoothly. In addition, Lab Spend has a clean modern design developed with the latest web technology allowing software to more responsive.
Lab Inventory
Feature Description
Quartzy
Lab Spend
Location Nesting
Two Levels
Unlimited
Location Updates on Site
No
Yes
Customized Search
No
Yes
Multiple Freezer Box Layouts
No
Yes
Advanced Item Auto-complete
No
Yes
Advanced Barcoding
No
Yes
EPA Reporting
No
Yes
Inventory Map
No
Yes
Item Checkout
No
Yes
GHS Pictograms
No
Yes
Item Tagging
No
Yes
Filter by Items with SDS
No
Yes
Filter by Items with CofA
No
Yes
Filter by Location and/or Tags
No
Yes
Bulk Export SDSs and CofAs
No
Yes
Facility Inventory
No
Yes
Quartzy limits your item location to only two levels, but what does that mean in practice? This means you can have an item be placed in Room 24 -> Bay 2 and that’s it. Lab Spend allows for unlimited nesting although for clarity often 4 to 5 levels is sufficient. This allows you to better describe the location of item such as Room 24 -> Bay 2 -> Shelf 3 -> Right Side or Bay 3 -> Freezer 1 -> Self 2 -> Rack 4. As you can imagine, two levels are not enough and Quartzy users can find themselves creating awkward naming schemes to try to stay organized. Your lab inventory should be designed for your needs not you adjusting to it.
Customized search options allow you flexibility in finding items in your inventory. This is very helpful since you may call items by a different name or simply search with the plural. For example, some labs call it a scale while others call it a balance, it’s helpful to have an inventory that can adapt.
Inventory mapping is unique to Lab Spend and it is great especially for new lab members as often locations are named for objects or projects that is unknown to new members. For example, we talk with labs that refer to a place as the microscope room, but if you don’t know where the microscope is then you can’t find it. We’ve solved this allowing you to map your inventory so anyone can search for an item and see where it is located in your lab.
Do all you have all your chemical SDSs on file?
It’s a simple question and with Quartzy you have to find, view, and open each item. In Lab Spend, you have a easily filter in seconds. You can also do this with certification of analysis documents. The result is saved time and better safety compliance.
Unique Tools
Feature Description
Quartzy
Lab Spend
Chemical Search Engine
No
Yes
Pricing Search Engine
No
Yes
The Chemical Search Engine in Lab Spend allows you to search across more than 100 companies based in the USA at once. This saves time searching multiple sites separately and allows you to quickly compare sizes and pricing.
What’s a good price on a give product?
Lab Spend uniquely can provide pricing insights into the chemical, supplies and equipment your lab is purchasing. Often compared to Kelly Blue Book for cars, Price Search allows you to gain insights into the market price on a given item.
Enter a catalog number and a pricing histogram is returned allowing you to make a better informed purchasing decision for you lab.
The features of Quartzy and Lab Spend will evolve over time as both companies evolve their offerings. We would encourage you to reach out (email: support@labspend.com) for a personal demo of Lab Spend.
