Laboratory Inventory Management System: Reagents, Consumables and What Needs Tracking

The recurring horror of the lab's reordering system

Ask any scientist what drives them up the wall day to day, and it's rarely the science. It's reordering.

There's the classic: someone uses the last of a reagent, but doesn't tell anybody, because it never occurred to them to do so. Weeks later, someone else opens the the cupboard or freezer mid-protocol, finds an empty tub, or a vial with a measly 0.5ul left in the bottom, and discovers that the supplier's lead time is two weeks minimum.

Then there's the duplicate-stock problem: four different people all made up the same buffer, because they couldn't see that there was already one on-the-go in the fridge (or because the date wasn't labelled clearly so nobody trusted the one they did find, but equally didn't want to throw it away and solve the problem, because maybe whoever made it DID know that it was still good).

Or the lab that somehow managed to run for years on only ever ordering one box of tips or gloves at a time and never having emergency supplies in stock, until one day they ran out ahead of the reorder and nobody could get anything done.

How a good inventory management system changes this

Laboratory inventory management software fixes this by building a safety net into your reordering process. Set a reorder threshold, and anything running low gets flagged immediately, rather than waiting until the next person is mid experiment to notice.

It also does something less obvious: it gives every reagent a defined home, so everybody knows where the existing stock is, and where there's space for the new batch to go. It can't completely guarantee that that one student whose bench space looks like a demolition site won't make a mess, but it can make tidiness the easy option.

Having a system isn't the same as using it, though. If keeping it accurate depends on someone remembering to update it every time, a system can exist and still fail the same way a spreadsheet does. Lab Thread solves the most common cause of failure. You set a "low stock" threshold once, at the design level, then the system monitors your actual stock levels against that threshold automatically from then on, no one has to notice and flag it themselves.

For CROs specifically, or in fact anyone budgeting for a collaboration, logging reagent and consumable use against project work makes it much easier to then cost that project accurately. The same link helps with research budgeting too: instead of estimating next year's reagent needs from a rough sense of last year's spend, a lab can see exactly what a given type of project used.

Why choose Lab Thread?

Academic labs of five people or fewer get Lab Thread's full laboratory inventory management system capabilities free. Beyond that, pricing is published and transparent, and inventory sits alongside your ELN, molecular biology tools and project management in the same record. One login, one subscription, everything connected. See how it fits into the full laboratory inventory management software on our LIMS page.

‍