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Seek and You Shall Find David Bradley
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f you’re running an analytical lab for a big company, you have likely sat back in frustration when the “offline” statistics for some of that rather expensive equipment cross your desk at budget review time. But time and resources are limited, and you simply cannot ensure that the equipment is being utilized full-time. Meanwhile, those in labs at smaller companies usually have the opposite problem—with restricted funds, they cannot afford expensive machines, especially if they might lie idle part of the time. The obvious solution would be to bring the two kinds of users together. If Dr. Big has underutilized instrumentation and expertise and Dr. Small is desperate to carry out an analytical procedure only possible with that equipment, then perhaps a symbiotic relationship could be forged to solve both their problems. But how do the good doctors get to meet? This is where a broker might come to the assistance of them both. One broker has set up a unique Web site (http://www.labseek.com) that provides such a service. LabSeek.com, a spin-off from the analytical services company Pace Analytical Services (Minneapolis, MN), began in July 1998. Its heart is a private database in which laboratories around the world can list their capabilities, available resources, and related information. Membership is open to consultants and corporate, commercial, nonprofit, government, and academic labs. In each case, the broker carries out an inventory of the member’s capabilities, including the instrumentation and the scientists’ experience and specialties.
A customer seeking a laboratory to assist with an analysis signs up at the Web site and completes a “request for proposal” (RFP), which provides details of the needed services. RFPs can be issued for services ranging from running standard published methods to fullfledged research and problem solving. LabSeek staff then search the database inventory and select the member laboratory that best matches the RFP. One advantage of the system is that it provides access to labs that would be otherwise unavailable to external customers. Once a match has been made, LabSeek contacts the customer by e-mail. If the member laboratory decides to pursue the project opportunity, it responds to the RFP with a project proposal,
which is posted on the secure Web server for customer review. Acceptance or rejection is as simple as clicking a button. On final acceptance, contracts are signed and samples are exchanged either directly or, when anonymity is required, through LabSeek. “The service should be especially useful to organizations that lack laboratory resources and have critical needs for analyses,” says David Stalling, LabSeek’s general manager and a Ph.D. scientist with broad analytical experience. “They can access highly qualified resources to apply to their problem from multiple areas via LabSeek.com.” But why base the service around the Web? Surely, the system requires faceto-face interaction to allow negotiations
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to be carried out at a more personal level. “The Internet brings a tremendously powerful option in terms of resource managing, and that’s the key feature that we have as a business model,” Stalling explained to Analytical Chemistry. The international nature of the Internet means membership is global, so customers have access to global analytical resources. Despite this, Stalling remarks that he is rather surprised by the international response, which has included e-mail contacts from as far afield as Japan and Slovenia. Speed of turnaround is perhaps the service’s major advantage. Stalling says it usually takes just a few days for a proposal to go through once a lab has been identified, and the turnaround is fastest if a standard published method is to be used. Stalling says that LabSeek hopes to cover all the commercial sectors where there is a niche for analytical chemistry. This, he admits, is a substantial challenge, especially because the company wants to cover all business sectors rather than focusing on a single segment of the marketplace, such as organics or industrial applications. Martin Tait, director of the corporate research center at BP Amoco’s site in Naperville, IL—a LabSeek member laboratory—has begun to see a flow of work coming from the broker since the summer. “We are a full-service integrated petroleum/chemical analytical laboratory with a suite of capabilities not generally available within one location,” Tait explains. “There is not much we cannot do or [many] analytical issues we cannot resolve for a variety of applications.” The result is that the BP Amoco lab has underutilized capacity and capabilities. The broker system has provided Tait’s lab with a means to recoup some costs through “outside” customers as well as to expose the scientists to analytical issues from other industries. So what does LabSeek gain from acting as coordinator of these symbiotic relationships between big and small labs? Corporate labs that join either pay
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an annual fee—the actual figures for which LabSeek prefers to keep confidential—or they pay to inventory data with a percentage fee on transactions. Stalling is reluctant to reveal how many transactions have taken place so far, but he does concede that there are contracts in place and that samples have been exchanged. LabSeek is developing the standard published methods area of its database, with the goal of providing off-the-shelf solutions, but this is still in the early stages. This aspect would accommodate additional member labs that might not consider themselves able to offer specialist services but, nevertheless, have the equipment in place.
So are we likely to see more and more go-betweens like LabSeek and ChemConnect? Van der Valk thinks so. “The amount of information on the Web is becoming so great that specialist ‘information brokers’ are going to become essential,” he says. Tait points out that although e-commerce is becoming more acceptable and comfortable, he doubts that any company will get by without a strong one-on-one relationship, customer service, and “friendly” staff. Personal interactions may be old-fashioned in today’s context, but they are not yet obsolete. Nevertheless, new Internet companies that rely mainly on electronic com-
The Internet is making it possible to match users who need analytical services with laboratories worldwide. Stalling points out that the system may not work for every customer. “We may or may not be able to meet the needs of the client, but the Internet brings us into an entirely new focus in terms of individuals who have a particular need for analytical chemistry and helping them find that resource,” he says. Another service broker to recognize the advantages of the Internet in commerce is serving a different chemical sector. According to Patrick van der Valk, vice president online of ChemConnect, Inc. (http://www.chemconnect.com), there are two main benefits for providing such services using the Web. “First off, it means no more waking up at early hours to talk to clients around the world . . . and secondly, the depth of information can be much greater than ever can be achieved by traditional channels,” he says. ChemConnect serves more than 10,000 regular users who are traders, manufacturers, and distributors of chemical commodities.
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munication to do business are constantly sprouting up to serve the chemistry community (see Anal. Chem. 1999, 71, 629 A– 631 A). One of the latest, WorldWideTesting.com (http://www.worldwidetesting.com), focuses on providing certificates of analysis for commodity chemicals sold or auctioned through the Internet. Such a company would be totally unnecessary without the exponential growth of global electronic communications. Indeed, Stalling believes the business concept of LabSeek itself “integrates business and science to facilitate problem solving. But without the Internet, it is doubtful that the business model could be supported.”
David Bradley is a science writer and a contributing editor for Analytical Chemistry. He is also the editor of Elemental Discoveries (http://www.sciencebase.com), a Web site devoted to chemistry.
