How Finance Teams Can Improve Productivity with An Online Marketplace

Experts estimate the cost to run a biotech lab can range from $10,000 to $40,000 per day. For a biotech organization, it can be as much as $100,000 per day. Consequently, research labs need to seize every opportunity to stay productive. Finance and Procurement teams are often burdened by lots of complex, administrative workflows, and many work with manual processes like Excel spreadsheets and paper forms that are error prone. When you enable your finance and procurement teams to optimize workflows using modern technology, you empower your entire company to save precious time and money.

For new biotech labs, getting set up with the right lab management tools right off the bat will be crucial in laying the foundation for your productivity.

Finance teams at biotech startups have several key focuses: 

• Organizing data for efficient and compliant internal reporting, audits, and month-end close
• Effectively managing multiple vendors
• Reducing spend and finding cost savings

To this end, they have several major pain points, including having:

• Too many manual processes around data entry and organization
• Too many vendors to interface with and keep on record
• Too many invoices to match to purchase orders
• Too little visibility into order status
• Too little visibility into spend management
• Too much overhead in internal spending request and approval processes

Here are key ways your teams can improve productivity and job satisfaction in biotech labs, starting with outlining relevant software and technology.

What is an online marketplace?

An online marketplace is an eCommerce website or app that facilitates the selling of products or services provided by multiple third party vendors. The host or operator of the marketplace does not own the inventory, but instead helps to streamline the procurement process for buyers.

Popular online marketplaces (like Amazon) are platforms that facilitate the selling and buying of millions of products for individual consumers. An industry-specific online marketplace such as ZAGENO is designed to streamline the purchasing of lab supplies and biotech products.

How can marketplaces improve finance team productivity?

You will interface with one single supplier: the marketplace, which eliminates the need to manage  multiple vendors in reporting processes. The marketplace will be your single vendor of record.

Your finance team no longer needs to deal with lengthy processes related to new vendor account creation and setup, credit checks, and bank letter of credit verification.

By leveraging marketplaces, ZAGENO customers have benefited from using an online marketplace for lab management. Specifically,

• Time to add new products was reduced from 2 - 3 days to less than 30 minutes
• Time to place an order was reduced from 4 - 6 days to less than 6 hours

Marketplaces like ZAGENO automate supplier invoices and PO matching, which is otherwise a huge headache and workstream for finance teams, especially around month-end close.

Moreover, some marketplaces provide integrated accounting software. ZAGENO, for instance, is a lab supply marketplace that integrates with QuickBooks, which automatically pushes invoices and can map into general ledger categories, reducing countless hours for finance teams in their reporting, compliance, and audit processes.

Marketplaces enable finance teams to have full visibility around order status. From fulfillment to cost to shipment to receipt to payment, finance teams can see, in real time, exactly where an order stands.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Expense management is a huge priority for finance teams, but without granular visibility into spending, finance teams cannot achieve effective expense management. With marketplaces, finance teams can have full, real time view and control over vendor based spending.

One of the biggest pain points for finance teams is coordinating with the scientific team around supply ordering. With online marketplaces, you can approve requests seamlessly in a centralized view.

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From working with hundreds of biotechs, ZAGENO found that using marketplace software for lab management can save 624 hours per year and eliminate $26,000 per year in time and monetary spend around invoicing, reporting, and ordering.