Lab supplies procurement is buying the reagents and consumables that a laboratory uses up every day. A reagent is a chemical or biological material used in a test, such as an antibody or an enzyme. Consumables are items that are used once and thrown away, such as pipette tips, tubes and gloves. A lab supplies marketplace is a website through which a laboratory compares and buys these items from many suppliers, with the organisation's ordering approvals built in.
Why is buying supplies hard? A research laboratory buys hundreds of different items from dozens of suppliers. The same antibody may be sold by five suppliers, under different names and at different prices. Scientists usually order what they used before, from whichever website they remember. The purchasing team then has to check each order, match it to a budget and pay many separate invoices.
The marketplaces of this kind serve mainly laboratories in the United States and Europe. Consider a biotech company's laboratory in Boston, in the United States. A scientist needs an antibody against a particular protein, and 20 boxes of pipette tips. She searches the marketplace. It shows the antibody from four suppliers, from $390 to $520, with each supplier's delivery time and the reviews of other scientists who used it. She picks one at $410. The marketplace knows the company's rules. Orders above $1,000 need her manager's approval. This one is $560 in total, so it goes straight through. The marketplace sends the order to each supplier, and later sends one combined invoice to the company's procure-to-pay software, which pays it.
The marketplace gets its catalogues from suppliers, many of which also sell through their own B2B ordering portals. It earns money by taking a fee from suppliers on each sale, or by charging the laboratory for the software.
In India, most laboratories buy supplies through local distributors of the big instrument and reagent makers. Government laboratories, including those of many universities, must usually buy through the Government e-Marketplace, or GeM, a public portal for government purchases. Many of the reagents that Indian laboratories use, such as antibodies, are imported, and some must travel in a cold chain.
Every other step in the laboratory depends on these supplies. The instruments described in chromatography and mass spectrometry, for example, need solvents, columns and vials for every test.