If you were extremely dissatisfied with a personal purchasing experience, such as ordering groceries from a nearby store, would you keep doing it? Probably not. Especially if it costs hours a week that you can’t afford to waste. When it comes to ordering lab supplies, scientists, lab managers, and procurement are often trapped in a time-consuming nightmare that can take up to two-thirds of their time each week. The good news is that it does not have to be this way.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, ZAGENO, the leading lab supply marketplace, surveyed hundreds of research scientists, lab operations, and procurement professionals across various biotech and pharmaceutical R&D labs about their lab supply purchasing processes. The results were not surprising; the lab supply ordering process is a source of extreme dissatisfaction.
“How likely is it that you would recommend your lab supply ordering process to a friend or colleague?”
When asked how likely they were to recommend their lab supply ordering process to a friend or colleague, the resounding answer was “not at all likely.” 67% were detractors (meaning they would not recommend), 25.7% were passive, and only 7.3% would actively recommend their current lab supply ordering process.
“Nothing.” – Scientist, Duke University
when asked to name their favorite thing about the lab supply buying process
A further measure of end-user satisfaction is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a well-established method in the business-to-consumer (B2C) world to assess overall customer experience quality.
Lab supply ordering process end-user dissatisfaction compared to other industries, as measured by Net Promoter Score
When compared to the NPS scores for the online shopping (45) and software (31) industries, lab supply ordering received an abysmal -60. ZAGENO believes that the business-to-business (B2B) experience can and should offer the same convenience to its customers as that of B2C.
Why is the lab supply ordering process viewed as such a nightmare?
One of the primary reasons for the extreme dissatisfaction with this process is the sheer number of hours wasted searching supplier websites for supplies.
ZAGENO found that on average, scientists and lab operations staff are forced to spend one full day a week searching, comparing, and purchasing lab supplies. Procurement and/or purchasing teams spend three days a week doing the same.
Hours spent each week searching supplier sites for lab supplies, by role
Scientists spend even more time searching for the right products for their experiments as an organization scales.
Hours spent each week searching supplier sites for lab supplies, by organization size
In the life sciences industry, many stakeholders waste too much time each week ordering lab supplies. This very manual endeavor takes scientists away from the bench, negatively impacts time-to-milestone achievements, ramps up costs, and stifles innovation.
Why does searching for lab supplies take so much time?
Unlike personal purchases, where you can visit a site like Amazon to easily compare products and prices, many companies utilize multiple PunchOut catalogs and supplier websites for their lab supply spend.
We’ve all heard that more is more, right? Well, in the case of navigating catalogs, more is, unfortunately, less.
Challenges of juggling multiple catalogs
- Difficult to compare products and pricing between vendors since you must punch out of one catalog and into another. No independent reviews available.
- Has limited, unsophisticated search functionality, making lab supply research and purchasing more time-consuming. Takes multiple tries to find correlating product name or exact product number.
- Prone to glitches, pricing inconsistencies, and delays in updating information.
Prior to partnering with ZAGENO, a biotech lab manager found herself searching and ordering from up to twenty sites per day (which added up to two-thirds of her week) in order to fulfill the lab’s ordering requests. To avoid this, the goal is to make the lab supply purchase process as Amazon-like as possible with a lab supply marketplace, such as ZAGENO, where millions of products from thousands of suppliers are streamlined through a single portal, with all orders being consolidated into one single invoice.
Time wasted navigating supplier websites is time spent away from the bench. Get in touch with ZAGENO today and learn how to wake up from your lab supply ordering nightmare so you can spend time on what really matters; the science itself.
1 Lab Supply Ordering from a Scientist’s Perspective: A ZAGENO Interview - ZAGENO
