Chemical Inventory

LAB INVENTORY SYSTEM: MY DAY TO DAY

If you are a scientist, this situation probably happened to you. You arrived in the morning full of motivation to try the idea you thought about the day before and planned you entire day with a tight schedule of many experiments. When you are ready to start, you go gather the reagents you need only to realize that you cannot find one. You then spend 30 min walking around asking your colleagues, sent an email to the whole group asking if somebody saw the reagent, looked at other possible locations and finally learned that somebody emptied the bottle but did not indicated it in the chemical inventory. An hour later not only you had to change your plan for the entire day, but you had to reorder the reagent and delay your experiments for a week. Overall, your day is ruined because somebody was not able to modify the chemical inventory and write that the bottle was empty.

Those frustrating and annoying situation happen very often with inappropriate chemical inventory systems.

An investigation done by a research organisation showed that 2 h of work per person were lost per week as a consequence of searching for chemicals because of their Excel chemical inventory system. For a group of 10 persons, it represents 1000 h per years, 125 work days, more than 6 work months of one person. It means that this company was losing half a year of work of a highly paid scientist because of their inadequate chemical inventory system.

Needless to say that it convince them to use FindMolecule.

In order to have an efficient chemical inventory you need two important things: 1) it has to be easily accessible and 2) it should be fast and easy to modify. This will ensure that the chemical inventory is always up to date.

That’s the main problem with the use of Excel spread sheet for example. As nobody keep them up to date is real time, the file becomes less useful, as the information are often incorrect. That’s the downward spiral of bad chemical inventory. If it’s not up to date, you don’t use it, if you don’t use it to search a chemical, you don’t modify it to indicate you took a chemical and the file get less up to date, which make it even less useful.

The solution is the use a web-based solution adapted for your needs with a barcode/scanner system to keep the info up to date.

FindMolecule does that !

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