You can’t see how much you have. So you buy more of it.
Fruitbat Echo is purchasing and inventory control for life science companies with 10 to 100 people. Material specifications, requisitions, approvals, purchase orders, receiving, lot-level inventory, and what each program actually cost — one shared system instead of a spreadsheet and a thread.
Or write to daniel@fruitbatsolutions.com
I’m a scientist and engineer by background — process development and analytical development. My last three roles were VP of R&D, VP of Manufacturing, and VP of Development. I never ran procurement, but I sure suffered from bad systems.
At a 60-person R&D biotech we had no system at all. Carbon-copy forms and email, and two people full time trying to keep up with it. They couldn’t. Nothing wrong with them — there was just no system, so they were doing all of it by hand.
Later I watched a 500-person company put in an ERP nobody could see through. You couldn’t tell what was on hand or what was already on order, so people ordered extra to be safe. A lot of it sat there until it expired. We wrote off tens of millions of dollars.
I built Echo because I wanted something in between and nobody was selling it.
I’ve done this kind of development before. As VP of R&D I led a bioreactor program — hardware, software, UX, all of it.
Echo is built and running. It’s early, and I’m working with a small number of companies to get it right. You’ll be dealing with me directly.
If your lab runs on spreadsheets and email, you already know this list.
| Asked over email today | In Echo |
|---|---|
| Do we have any left? | Free vs. reserved vs. on order |
| Have we bought this before? | One search across material, vendor, catalog #, program |
| Where is it? | Lot → location → program |
| Did that get ordered? When is it coming? | PO status, expected date, and late orders surface themselves |
| Who approved this? | Requester, submitter, approver — all recorded |
| What did that program cost us? | A page nobody had to assemble |
All of them get asked, every day, by people who have better things to do.
One order, start to finish
Someone in the lab finds what they need on a supplier’s site and pastes the link. Echo builds the catalog record from it, so there’s no form to fill out and nothing to learn.
They tag it to a program and submit it. The approver gets notified, and everyone else can see it sitting there — who asked, for what, and where it’s got to.
Once it’s approved, Echo writes the POs. One per vendor, and nobody retypes the order.
When the shipment arrives, Echo offers the storage locations that material is approved for. The wrong shelf isn’t on the list.
Receiving it also turns the program tag into a reservation, so the material is spoken for before anyone comes looking. Another program can’t quietly take it.
Meanwhile the program’s page has been keeping the tally: what’s on order, what’s on hand, what’s been used, and what it cost.
The numbers are there because Echo did the work, not because someone compiled them.
I’m not the first person to notice this.
A study of 525 small and mid-sized companies looked at six kinds of business software. Two were associated with higher productivity: systems that manage materials and suppliers, and systems that route shared work between people. Echo is both.
A separate study of 927 German companies, from five employees up, found that the ones running a system for purchasing and inventory had about 14% higher labor productivity than the ones that didn’t.
Shin, Adoption of Enterprise Application Software and Firm Performance, Small Business Economics 26(3) (2006) — 525 SMEs, six software categories, supply-chain and groupware systems significant. Engelstätter, Enterprise Systems and Labor Productivity, ZEW Discussion Paper 09-040 (2009) — supply-chain systems, +13.5% with other enterprise systems controlled.
Twenty minutes
Tell me how you handle ordering and inventory today. If Echo isn’t a fit, I’ll say so.
Or write to daniel@fruitbatsolutions.com