Automating Lab Procurement Paperwork
Part of the reason that Lab Procurement Services is able to keep costs low despite our small size is due to our partnership with Simple Software, who specialize in low-cost tools for data entry and workflow automation. By automating every part of the purchasing workflow, our procurement experts are able to process many more transactions with better accuracy, while supervising every part of the purchasing process.
Even in the digital age, there is still a ton of paperwork exchanged every day as part of the procurement, invoicing, and payment cycle. While the largest labs have integrated systems to process this paperwork, many small and mid-sized labs lack the transaction volume to justify investing in a platform that includes these features. The ones designed for smaller labs usually lack some of the data entry automation features that make the biggest impact on workloads.
Most companies implement an electronic purchasing workflow with their largest vendors that have dozens or hundreds of transactions each day. This fully automates the process, but usually requires significant effort from both lab and vendor to set it up. For decades, this type of automation was done with “EDI” or Electronic Data Interchange systems that ran over private networks, and were more compatible with mainframes than modern business applications. Most modern systems have API interfaces, and tools such as Robotic Process Automation are available for those that don’t. There are many more ways to set up a fully electronic purchasing relationship with a vendor now, and it’s often easy to justify doing so even for a few transactions per week.
Using LPS vendor consolidation can also help streamline your procurement process. LPS can act as your purchasing agent, conducting business with your existing vendors, assessing a fixed transaction cost instead of acting as a distributor. This way, you can establish fully-automated electronic purchasing with LPS, and let us worry about placing and paying for orders with all of your vendors.
LPS and Simple Software have a portfolio of automation tools that work independently of the lab management, ERP, and any other systems you have in place. We can examine your entire procure-to-pay workflow, identify the points that offer the biggest ROI from automation, and recommend solutions that will integrate with all the platforms you already use. Reach out to us or schedule a consultation today to find out how much time you could be saving!
War Story #5
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and New Orleans twenty years ago. I was
a Region Manager with VWR at the time, and was traveling with my boss, (the
Area Vice President), who asked if we could go to my home so that he could take
a senior management financial call.
VWR had been acquired by a venture capital company a couple of years before
this, and the new owners were focused on achieving what they described as
“explosive growth.” This growth was expected in an industry in which customers
were notoriously loyal to their incumbent supplier, and without any additional
investment on the new owner’s part. Sheer force of will would achieve “double
digit growth.”
I had never sat in on one of these calls before; it was above my pay grade. But my
boss asked me to listen in. The person leading the call was “Jimmy.” Apparently
one way to assert dominance in this senior management pecking order was to add
a “y” to the name of anyone below you on the organizational chart.
The General Manager was referred to as “Mikey” for example. Mikey was in the
hot seat. He had forecast sales of X million dollars, but the results came up far
short of X. So Jimmy wanted Mikey to explain why his forecast was so far off.
Mikey explained that a good portion of the area he covered was in the Gulf Coast,
and that a major hurricane (Katrina) had just hit New Orleans, where two of his
sales reps were located, and that their homes and all the businesses they called on,
were literally under water. They were certainly not buying lab supplies as
forecast.
Jimmy’s response was “Are those two reps still on the payroll?” Mikey said:
“Well of course! They just lost their homes! Do you expect me to go fire them
now?
Jimmy said: “Mikey, that’s why we pay you the big bucks - to make the tough
decisions. Your sales forecast is way off so you must cut expenses. You have two
reps doing nothing. If you can’t fire them, I can. I will be in Atlanta next week
and I will do it personally. The call ended abruptly at that point.
Of course, Jimmy never showed up in Atlanta the following week. It was all just
bluster. But it taught me more about the ruthlessness of business in one phone call
than I had learned in 30 years to that point.
