You can’t measure what you can’t see. In biotech lab procurement, spend visibility isn’t just a nice to have; it’s essential for maintaining budget control and optimizing purchasing decisions. True spend visibility means having a clear, real-time understanding of where all lab resources are going.
Without this level of insight, labs face hidden costs, inefficient ordering, and procurement bottlenecks that slow down research. However, procurement platforms, such as life science marketplaces, help finance teams and lab managers track and strategically manage spending on a granular level with real-time analytics, automated workflows, and supplier insights. Here’s how to get started on the path to visibility.
What is spend visibility?
Spend visibility refers to the ability to track, analyze, and manage spending across all aspects of lab procurement. It involves consolidating purchasing data, automating workflows, and leveraging analytics to gain insights into spending patterns.
Read more: 7 Tips for CFO Spend Visibility
Why spend visibility is essential in lab supply procurement
When full transparency isn’t a cornerstone of your procurement practices, you’re risking overspending, inefficient purchasing decisions, and compliance issues, for starters.
By prioritizing spend visibility, biotech teams can:
- Enhance collaboration between lab managers, finance teams, and suppliers.
- Speed up decision-making with real-time data on purchasing trends and budget availability.
- Reduce administrative workload by minimizing time spent tracking orders and approvals.
- Improve compliance with clear, documented spending policies.
- Automate procurement workflows, cutting down on manual errors and delays.
For biotech finance teams, spend visibility isn’t just about tracking purchases, it’s about implementing a system that intuitively captures and synthesizes information, providing the insights needed for strategic spending decisions and accurate forecasting.
How to improve spend visibility in biotech procurement
Achieving full spend visibility doesn’t happen overnight. It requires incremental improvements that build on each other.
- Centralize procurement data. Visibility starts with accessibility. A centralized procurement platform ensures that all stakeholders—scientists, procurement, lab managers, and finance teams—have real-time access to order history, approvals, and spending patterns. Without this, teams waste time hunting for information across emails, spreadsheets, and outdated systems.
Steps to centralize procurement data include:- Identify all internal sources of spend, such as general ledger, finance and accounting systems, procure-to-pay (P2P) platforms, and ERP platforms.
- Adopt a life sciences procurement platform, such as ZAGENO, that integrates with all existing platforms, functioning as a sole source of spend, integrating supplier catalogs, order tracking, and spend analytics.
- Ensure every team member can access real-time procurement data based on their role.
Learn more: Taxonomy Isn’t Just for Scientists. Why Classification Matters for Procurement & Sourcing Leaders
- Remove the blind spots with approval workflow transparency. Opaque approval processes create blind spots in procurement. If approvals happen via email or across multiple disconnected systems, tracking spending accurately becomes difficult. Delayed approvals can also create uncertainty around budget commitments, impacting forecasting and lab operations.
To enhance spend visibility through approvals:- Implement a centralized approval system where all decisions are logged and visible to key stakeholders.
- Set clear approval thresholds to ensure that routine purchases don’t require excessive oversight.
- Use automated alerts to notify finance teams of pending approvals that may affect budgets.
Learn more: How to Achieve Maximum Spend Control
- Automate procurement processes. Manual procurement workflows obscure real-time spending data. Automating key aspects of procurement increases visibility by ensuring every transaction is logged, categorized, and reported accurately.
Ways to enhance visibility through automation:- Use a procurement platform that offers automated order tracking and spend reporting.
- Regularly audit procurement workflows to uncover inefficiencies and areas for automation.
- Integrate AI-driven analytics to forecast future supply needs and optimize inventory.
Learn more: How to Automate and Simplify Existing Workflows
- Don’t forget visibility into supplier relationships. True visibility also encompasses aspects like supplier performance, pricing fluctuations, and order reliability. When supplier interactions aren’t documented, labs risk hidden costs and inconsistent procurement.
How to improve supplier transparency:- Leverage digital procurement platforms that provide real-time supplier updates and pricing insights.
- Diversify supplier relationships to reduce dependence on single-source vendors, increasing cost predictability.
Learn more: Strategic Biotech Supplier Management
How using a lab supply marketplace improves spend visibility
A lab supply marketplace like ZAGENO takes spend visibility to the next level by providing a centralized, automated, and data-driven approach to procurement.
Here’s how ZAGENO supports biotech labs in optimizing their spend:
- Real-time spend reporting. ZAGENO offers a comprehensive, real-time lab supply expense dashboard, enabling finance and lab managers to make data-driven purchasing decisions.
- Cost analysis and budget control. The platform allows filtering by timeframe, user, user types, categories, location, cost center, product types, products, project codes, supplier brands, and more, helping labs identify spending trends and stay within budget.
- Supplier consolidation. By centralizing all non-catalog spend, ZAGENO reduces procurement complexity, helps tame longtail spend, and improves financial oversight.
- Seamless integration and data sharing. ZAGENO easily integrates with existing systems, such as Coupa, SAP Ariba, Jaggaer, QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP ERP, and more, making it easy to access and analyze procurement data.
- Streamlined procurement process. With automated order tracking, supplier management, and white-glove customer support, labs can focus on research while maintaining full visibility into spending.
The future of biotech spend visibility
As the biotech industry continues to evolve, spend visibility will be a driving force in smarter procurement strategies. With advancements in AI, automation, and procurement platforms, labs can gain deeper insights into their purchasing habits and optimize budgets like never before.
Investing in spend visibility tools today will lead to greater efficiency, cost savings, and streamlined operations in the long run. If you’re ready to enhance transparency in your lab’s procurement process, schedule a demo with ZAGENO to see how our platform can help.
