Once a rarity, supply chain disruptions are now a fact of life for industries across all markets, and life sciences is no exception. The early phases of the COVID pandemic brought these issues into sharp focus, with researchers, manufacturers, and healthcare industries bearing the brunt of the impact of shortages and interruptions.

While these particular disruptions have been resolved, new ones always seem to rise up in their place, with geopolitical tensions, weather disasters and labor strikes all having an impact on supply chains in 2024. 

However, shortages and delays aren’t always global issues – they are often caused by lack of stock with a few key suppliers. But finding alternative suppliers and onboarding new catalogs has historically been a cumbersome process for purchasing departments, forcing organizations to wait out delays. 

New developments in life sciences purchasing promise to make these processes easier, with three major trends at play:

1. Growth of private purchasing platforms for life sciences research
2. Faster onboarding of “tail” suppliers and other vendors not being actively managed by procurement
3. New tools to search for approved alternatives through equal, exact, and functional matches

Private Purchasing Platforms Keep Labs Running

When laboratories have access to a private marketplace, or also known as a dedicated purchasing platform, they have many more options than just their primary suppliers, giving them a simple way to secure the protocols and equipment needed to continue their research. 

These marketplace platforms function much like consumer marketplaces, with a critical distinction: procurement teams have control over which suppliers and manufacturers they want to include on the platform. With hundreds of suppliers in the network, procurement teams can quickly source onboard any supplier or manufacturer they choose, giving purchasing managers access to a much wider selection than the traditional model of managing supply catalogs in house.

Quick Onboarding with Hundreds of Suppliers

As a software vendor, Labviva works with hundreds of specialized suppliers around the world, and make all of their catalogs available aggregated into a single search interface on the Labviva Purchasing Platform. Purchasers choose which suppliers they want on their private instance, with Labviva handling the vetting and facilitating the transaction.

Because the Labviva platform integrates with existing purchasing systems like Jaggaer, SAP Ariba, Oracle, and others, there is no concern about shadow purchases or losing oversight – everything is accounted for in existing workflows and processes. 

Will This One Work Instead? Equal, Functional, and Exact Match Search

Equal, functional, and exact match search are foundational to a user-friendly life sciences marketplace. 

Many purchasing managers are well aware that private label products from different suppliers come from a handful of the same factories and are identical products. However, without an integrated platform, comparing options can be cumbersome and time-consuming. When we consider the hundreds of thousands of reagents, chemicals, and instrumentation that are on the market, it’s impossible for procurement professionals to have this information at the tip of their fingers for every product.

The Labviva Purchasing Platform makes this possible. It uses AI to enrich data from the supplier with additional publicly available data like journal citations and scientific databases. With this information, researchers can quickly understand what substitutions may be made, and get more detail when embarking on new projects.

The second step is providing side-by-side comparisons. If one is searching for a 12x75mm test tube, Labviva displays the manufacturer information across different brands, making it easy to do a true comparison.

It’s not unlike online shopping as a consumer: type in a product name and brand, and the ecommerce site you are using will likely return exact results, but you’ll also get suggestions for compatible and competitive items.

Internal product reviews add another layer of insight. We pull reviews from the community to ensure the suppliers on the platform are of high quality and reputable.

While no software application can protect against every circumstance, moving away from vendor lock-in and toward modern platform enablement will help procurement leaders keep their life sciences labs stocked and ready to handle new research, even as new challenges appear on the horizon.

‍Learn more about how Labviva’s easy-to-use platform is designed with life sciences professionals in mind to accelerate the pace of research. Request a demo of Labviva.