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LANEXO Lab Efficiency Calculator

Improve Your Lab Inventory Practices at the Click of a Button


What could your researchers do with more hours in their day?

Inventory management is critical to a research lab’s day-to-day operations. But it takes up an enormous amount of time—time that your scientists could be spending on the breakthrough discoveries that fuel innovation and competitive advantage.

With that in mind, we’ve created an iPDF tool, the LANEXO® Lab Efficiency Calculator, that can help you estimate how much time and money you lose to manual or other inefficient lab inventory practices. The calculator also shows you how the system you currently have in place compares with a fully automated digital solution like the LANEXO®Inventory Manager.

 

Where does all that time go?

The average research lab stocks hundreds if not thousands of individual vials, tubes, bottles and other containers of reagents, buffers, in-house prepared solutions and many other consumables. In a typical day, lab staff carry out a range of inventory activities, including registering new consumables; recording opening dates; calculating expiry dates; and tracking usages, storage locations and other details.
Each task may take just a few minutes… but when you add all those minutes up, they amount to a huge time sink. According to a study we conducted with C&EN, respondents lost a full 25% of their work time to managing consumables data in the lab. That’s 10 hours out of every 40-hour week. 
In addition, the imprecision of manual inventory management makes it challenging for scientists to find the materials they need in their experiments. The average researcher spends 50 minutes looking for a consumable in the lab. If the item is present but can’t be found, the scientist may give up and order an unneeded replacement, and the overlooked bottle may expire and go to waste.

The LANEXO® Inventory Manager was specifically designed to address these inefficiencies. By providing access to consumables data in real time at the touch of a button, the system promotes efficient usage of materials, preventing you from running out of materials or unwittingly using an expired one in an experimental workflow. One user has called it “game changer”: it’s enabled some labs to spend 97% less time on inventory maintenance.

Radiofrequency identification (RFID) Smart Labels with QR codes contain all data about the bottles of chemicals they’re applied to. Scanning the labels with the LANEXO® Mobile App on an Android phone makes all that information available at the click of a mouse or the touch of a screen.

One QC lab with three sites dramatically slashed the time it spent managing inventory after implementing the LANEXO® Inventory Manager. Stock counts that used to take 32 hours now take only 4. Scientists no longer need to comb through the cabinets of all three labs and check the expiry date on every bottle—they can get all the data they need from their desks using the inventory dashboard on the LANEXO® Web App.

 

Crunching the numbers

The LANEXO® Lab Efficiency Calculator is easy to use: just enter the prompted information about your inventory and management practices, and the tool calculates: 

  • The total hours spent in your lab on inventory management
  • The hours spent by each scientist on inventory tasks
  • The cost of inventory waste when stock goes unused and expires
  • How the LANEXO® Inventory Manager could change these figures

Find out how many hours you could be saving every week, month and year in your lab.

Download the LANEXO® Lab Efficiency Calculator

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