You’re not alone if you’re discovering that scaling a laboratory operation is demanding especially when you’re under pressure to deliver for investors and scientific milestones. Procurement bottlenecks, equipment challenges, compliance gaps, and optimizing processes and controls can all slow your momentum.
Here’s the reality: most scale-up labs hit the same operational walls. The difference between those that thrive and those that struggle lies in how quickly they identify and solve these challenges. Let’s explore the five critical areas where growing labs get stuck and how the right solutions can transform these obstacles into competitive advantages.
What started as a manageable, controlled process has ballooned as your team expanded and projects multiplied. Here’s what keeps many CFOs awake at night: Are you able to maintain budgetary or operational expenditure controls while empowering scientists to deliver?
Without proper oversight, procurement spending can easily spiral out of control. Different team members negotiate with different suppliers, often paying premium prices for the same reagents. Purchase orders multiply across departments, creating administrative chaos and making it nearly impossible to track true R&D costs against budget.
That specialized antibody your research depends on? It’s suddenly on backorder with a 12-week lead time. The consumables you need for your validation studies? Delayed due to shipping disruptions. These aren’t just minor inconveniences they’re existential threats to your funding timeline.
When delays occur, entire projects can grind to a halt, jeopardizing investor milestones and burning through runway without progress to show for it. It can be especially difficult if you do not have a robust solution in place to track open orders. A small problem can take hours or days to fix, derailing the science.
Picture this: your research team is interrupted six times per day by delivery drivers. Packages pile up in hallways because no one knows what’s arriving when. Critical reagents sit unopened while researchers waste time sorting through shipments to find what they need.
This constant disruption isn’t just annoying it’s expensive. Every interruption costs focus and momentum. Researchers spend valuable time on logistics instead of science, while storage areas overflow with consumables ordered by different team members without coordination.
Our cloud-based purchasing platform eliminates these headaches entirely. Designed by scientists who understand your workflows, the system puts over 25 million pre-negotiated deals at your fingertips. Instead of spending hours sourcing suppliers and negotiating prices, your team can purchase what they need with a single click.
We’re Europe’s largest buying group for laboratory consumables. This collective purchasing power means you automatically access the best prices available significantly better than what you could negotiate independently.
We’ve invested in supplier integrations, meaning that confirmed delivery dates are available in the software within minutes of placing the order, resulting in planned operations on time.
Our consolidation technology automatically combines orders from the same supplier into single purchase orders. This simple innovation reduces deliveries, minimizes carriage costs, eliminates minimum order charges, and dramatically reduces the number of invoices your finance team processes. Your researchers stay focused on research while your costs stay under control.
You’ve doubled your headcount and tripled your project portfolio, but your lab space remains the same. Prime bench space that should house critical experiments is instead occupied by storage cabinets full of consumables. Researchers are literally working around boxes of supplies that arrived faster than you could organize proper storage.
This space crunch creates a domino effect of problems. Workflows become inefficient as teams compete for equipment access. Collaboration suffers when researchers can’t easily move between workstations. Most critically, you can’t bring on the additional talent needed to meet aggressive research timelines.
Decentralized purchasing seemed harmless when you were a small team. Now it’s creating expensive chaos. Different researchers order the same consumables without knowing what colleagues already have in stock. Premium products expire on shelves while teams place new orders for identical items.
Without proper inventory management, you’re simultaneously overstocked and understocked—carrying too much of some items while running out of others at critical moments. This ties up working capital in dead inventory while creating project delays when essential materials aren’t available.
Every square foot of lab space represents significant fixed costs in rent, utilities, and infrastructure. When that space is poorly utilized for storage rather than optimized for research productivity, you’re essentially paying premium prices for an expensive warehouse.
Our inventory management system transforms storage from a space-consuming burden into a strategic advantage. The platform enables smart distribution of consumables across multiple locations, including off-site storage facilities, freeing up prime lab space for actual research.
Configurable user permissions give you granular control over purchasing decisions, while automated reordering using barcode scanning ensures you never run out of critical supplies. The system optimizes reorder points to minimize storage requirements while maximizing availability.
We go beyond software solutions. Our team can visit your facilities to analyze your current storage setup and recommend optimizations that maximize your existing space. Many clients discover they can accommodate 30-50% more inventory in the same footprint through better organization and workflow design.
The equipment that served you well during early-stage research is now holding you back. That benchtop centrifuge worked fine for small sample volumes, but it can’t handle the throughput your scaled operations demand. The microscope that captured beautiful proof-of-concept images lacks the automation features needed for high-throughput screening.
It’s likely that you will need to buy more equipment, which is a time-consuming and specialist job.
As your equipment portfolio expands, managing service contracts becomes increasingly complex. Critical instruments require different maintenance schedules with different vendors. Contracts expire without notice, leaving expensive equipment unprotected just when you can least afford downtime.
Equipment failures during critical experiments can destroy months of work and jeopardize key milestones.
Our specialist procurement team combines deep scientific backgrounds with extensive vendor relationships to take the complexity out of equipment purchasing. We manage the entire process from initial specification through tender management, vendor selection, delivery, installation, and commissioning.
More importantly, we ensure all supporting infrastructure is in place before your equipment arrives. Power, networking, environmental controls, and safety systems are coordinated so there’s no delay in getting your new capabilities operational.
Our equipment lifecycle management tracks all service contracts and maintenance schedules, automatically alerting you to renewals and scheduling preventive maintenance to minimize downtime risks. This proactive approach protects your investment and ensures equipment availability when you need it most.
Early-stage research thrives on flexibility and rapid iteration. But as you scale, GxP compliance can become a requirement.
The consequences of compliance failures extend far beyond fines or warnings. Regulatory issues can derail partnerships, delay funding rounds, and damage reputations that take years to rebuild. In extreme cases, compliance failures can shut down operations entirely.
Do you have documented control to manage materials entering your facilities? Can you trace every reagent, consumable, and piece of equipment back to its source? These aren’t just theoretical questions—they’re fundamental requirements for any organization seeking GMP approval.
Without electronic systems, achieving this traceability requires enormous manual effort. Documents get lost, batch records are incomplete, and audit preparation becomes a nightmare that diverts resources from core research activities.
Our GMP-validated inventory management system addresses these challenges comprehensively. The platform covers everything from materials specification through inbound inspection, barcoding, and warehouse operations.
Every transaction creates an immutable audit trail that satisfies regulatory requirements while supporting your operational needs. Materials traceability becomes automatic rather than manual, reducing compliance burden while improving data quality.
The system scales seamlessly from early compliance requirements through full GMP operations. This means you can implement appropriate controls for your current stage while building the foundation for future regulatory requirements.
Biotech investors have seen too many promising companies fail due to operational mismanagement. They’re not just evaluating your science they’re assessing your team’s ability to deploy capital efficiently and hit critical milestones on schedule.
Investors want detailed visibility into how their money is being spent. They expect robust financial controls, accurate forecasting, and clear accountability for every major expenditure. Companies that can’t provide this transparency struggle to maintain investor confidence and secure follow-on funding.
Our integrated LabOps platform provides the transparency and control investors expect. Expense approval workflows and real-time spending analytics enable proactive management that demonstrates operational discipline and responsible capital deployment.
The operational challenges of scaling a biotech aren’t just inevitable growing pains they’re opportunities to build sustainable competitive advantages. Organizations that solve these challenges early establish operational excellence that accelerates growth and attracts investor confidence.
Ready to transform your operations? Contact MyAmici today to discuss your specific scaling challenges and discover how our solutions can accelerate your growth.
Get in touch with MyAmici today to explore how we can streamline your procurement and Lab Operations.