Lab Inventory and Ordering

How we manage our lab inventory

Ordering

Placing orders

Orders are placed by Gemma Hamilton using the Orders Sheet in the Blood Cancer Group Teams files. This link should take you to the folder, make sure you use the latest order sheet.

Orders must be placed by Monday evening. So Simon can enter cost codes by orders, and then orders be placed on Tuesday and Wednesday. If Simon doesn't understand an order he probably wont put a cost code by it, so it's good to run your ordering plans past him in your weekly 1-on-1s or on Slack so he understands what he is approving.

Late orders can't be processed, so plan your ordering appropriately.

Where possible, always get a quote before ordering as often you get a discount, and all it takes is an e-mail.

Receiving orders

Orders will be brought to your office by the tech team. Please take it in turns to put things away so that the person closest to the door doesn't end up doing all the work!

When you receive an order please sign the despatch note included with the shipment, date it, photograph it, and send it to the team Whatsapp so that Gemma can mark the order as received.

Put the item away, and record where you put it on LabSpend (see below).

Inventory Management

Wet lab consumables rules

Sharing reagents saves us money and lets us do more science. Everything ordered for the lab belongs to the lab rather than the specific project it was ordered for. This lets us manage things more efficiently, save money, and adapt to the needs of the project. To make sure you can plan experiment appropriately we use LabSpend to manage stocks and reserve reagents for upcoming experiments.

If someone asks to borrow/use something that you ordered, your default answer should be yes. If you have any doubt whether you can use something ask in the #wetLab Slack channel where Simon can make sure we prioritise the needs of multiple projects appropriately. If you're going to say no to sharing a reagent you must talk to Simon. If someone says no to sharing a reagent you must talk to Simon.

LabSpend

We use LabSpend to manage our inventory here: https://labspend.com/offers/inventory

If you need a login talk to Simon.

Adding items to LabSpend

You may want to add to an existing item's stock count or add a new item. So, first search for the item and see if it's already in stock. For example if you had just received new Cytofix/Cytoperm you could search for perm and see we already have 1 bottle in the fridge. You may wish to just update this quantitiy to 2.

If you want to store it somewhere else, or your search shows we don't have any of the item already, you'll need to add it as a new item.

Click on "Inventory", and "Add Item" to "Add Item"

You'll be presented with a form to fill in containing the information on the item. An example is below. Feel free to tag your item for easy filtering later, we can add or remove tags that are useful. This will let you later filter all "flow cyometry antibodies" for example, or all Western blot reagents.

If your item contains multiple smaller items (e.g. mutliple tubes in a kit) you can list them all and their sizes by clicking Container Management.

Using items in LabSpend

When you're planning an experiment and want to make sure you have enough stock of key reagents you can "check them out" in lab spend. This will mark the item (or a number of items) as reserved so no one can use it until you check it back in.

You must only reserve reagents for experiments that you plan to start before the next order (1 week).