What Is the Best Procurement Integration Approach for Biotech Teams?

What does procurement integration mean for biotech companies?

Procurement integration describes how seamlessly your lab supply ordering, financial workflows, approval processes, and supplier data connect across the organization. In biotech, a strong integration setup ensures:

• R&D can quickly find and order the materials they need
• Procurement maintains visibility across suppliers, pricing, and contracts
• Finance receives accurate, structured data that supports close cycles
• Leaders gain real-time insights into spend and supplier performance

When these systems work together, labs stay productive and financial reporting stays accurate. When they do not, delays, errors, and budget uncertainty follow.

According to a recent analysis shared by Procurement Magazine, McKinsey reports that procurement teams now manage 50 percent more spend than they did five years ago, creating new pressure to digitize workflows and reduce manual effort as supply chains remain unpredictable.

To understand the upstream challenges that make integration essential, see our guide on ERP procurement issues in biotech.

Why does procurement integration matter more in biotech than in other industries?

Biotech R&D environments create unique operational pressures that ERPs were never designed to manage.

High frequency of specialized orders
R&D teams place dozens or even hundreds of small, specialized orders every week. Standard ERP purchasing flows struggle under this volume.

Constant changes in experiment requirements
Scientific work shifts quickly. Procurement systems must adapt without slowing down research.

Volatile scientific supply chains
Life sciences materials face unpredictable availability. Real-time data is crucial for preventing delays. For example, the FDA notes that pharmaceutical and biologics supply chains carry inherent risks such as supplier variability, raw material constraints, and interruptions that can impact production timelines.

Tight financial, audit, and compliance expectations
Investors and regulators expect clear purchasing records. Disconnected workflows make audits significantly harder.

Cross-functional dependencies
R&D, procurement, finance, and operations all rely on clean purchasing data to do their jobs effectively.

These demands make procurement integration a core operational requirement, not an optional feature.

What does the best procurement integration approach look like for biotechs?

Across high-growth biotechs, the strongest integration setups follow a consistent structure: ERP as the financial backbone and a specialized procurement platform as the operational layer.

This produces the control finance teams need and the flexibility lab teams rely on.

1. ERP as the financial system of record
   The ERP remains the source of truth for:
   • Budget governance
   • Cost centers and GL codes
   • Approvals
   • Invoicing and payments
   • Close cycles

This preserves financial integrity while avoiding expensive ERP customizations that rarely solve lab purchasing challenges.

2. A procurement platform designed for scientific purchasing
   A dedicated procurement layer manages the complexity ERPs cannot support. This includes:
   • Unified search across millions of SKUs
   • Real-time availability, pricing, and delivery
   • Fast onboarding of new suppliers
   • Simple requests for catalog and non-catalog items
   • Preferred supplier routing
   • Consolidated cart and checkout
   • Clear experiment and cost center coding
   • End-to-end order tracking

You can explore these capabilities further in our lab supply marketplace overview.

3. Seamless integration between procurement and the ERP
   The best integration setups allow procurement to operate efficiently while ERP financial data stays clean and complete. A strong connection enables:
   • Automatic PO creation in the ERP
   • Accurate mapping to GL codes and cost centers
   • Automated 3-way match of PO, receipt, and invoice
   • Real-time visibility into committed versus actual spend
   • Fewer manual corrections during the month-end close

This reduces burdens on procurement and finance while giving leaders clearer visibility.

4. Preferred supplier alignment and contract compliance
   A high-performing procurement integration setup helps biotechs:
   • Route orders to preferred vendors
   • Maintain consistent pricing
   • Strengthen supplier relationships
   • Reach rebate thresholds
   • Reduce maverick spending

This is especially useful for companies scaling rapidly or managing tight budgets.

5. Support for non-catalog and custom orders
   R&D often requires items not found in standard catalogs. The best systems allow teams to request custom or specialty items without slowing down purchasing.
   
   This aligns with ZAGENO’s procurement support for both catalog and non-catalog orders.

6. Analytics that support R&D, procurement, and finance
   A strong procurement integration setup offers clear, real-time insights into:
   
   • Spend by team or project
   • Supplier performance
   • Delivery delays
   • Backorder trends
   • Budget variances
   • Price fluctuations

This level of visibility helps leaders protect runway and manage scientific and financial risk.

For more guidance on improving budget visibility, see our article on spend management for better procurement practices.

What does poor procurement integration look like?

Biotech teams typically recognize a need for better integration when they experience:

• Frequent backorders or supply surprises
• Long supplier onboarding timelines
• Off-platform or unauthorized purchasing
• Delays during the month-end close
• Manual data cleanup in the ERP
• Unclear cost attribution for experiments
• Reliance on spreadsheets to track orders
• Experiments delayed by procurement bottlenecks

Once these patterns emerge, optimizing procurement integration becomes one of the highest-impact operational improvements a biotech can make.

How do biotechs evaluate procurement integration options?

Teams usually consider three paths:

Option 1: Customize the ERP

Pros: Centralized workflow
Cons: Expensive, slow to maintain, and still not suited for scientific purchasing

Option 2: Use lightweight marketplace add-ons

Pros: Simple to implement
Cons: Limited supplier coverage, shallow integration, not built for life sciences

Option 3: Use a dedicated procurement platform built for biotech (recommended)

Pros: Deep scientific purchasing capabilities, real-time data, clean ERP integration, consolidated checkout, and faster onboarding
Cons: Requires implementation, although significantly lighter than ERP customization

Almost all high-growth biotechs choose option 3 because it provides the best combination of operational speed and financial clarity.

When should a biotech upgrade its procurement integration setup?

Teams typically make the transition when they experience:

• More than 15 to 20 lab supply orders per week
• Delays due to slow supplier onboarding
• Inconsistent purchasing data in the ERP
• Unclear spend visibility across teams or projects
• More purchases happening outside approved workflows
• Difficulty enforcing preferred supplier use
• Time-consuming reconciliation processes

These are strong signals that procurement and ERP workflows need a more robust connection.