I used to love baseball as a kid. Still do.
When I was much younger, I’d go into the backyard with anyone willing to put on a mitt. If they had the endurance (and mom and dad both tried their best to outlast me), I’d throw pitches and make diving catches until the mosquitos chased us into the house when the sun went down.
I wanted to be a pitcher, so I spent most of the time trying to get more curve into my curveball. Or more knuckle into my knuckleball. Or to just throw a plain old strike.
But every once in a while I’d pick up the bat and crack a few dingers. For an 8 year old, a dinger doesn’t need to fly out of sight. If it got close to the back patio of the house, I thought I was Mike Schmidt.
We had a big, wide-open back yard. The house was an old one, in the north of Aston township.
I thought it might be haunted or cursed, and that had a lot to do with the strange stained glass window in the attic, overlooking the yard. It must have been taken straight out of a church by an earlier owner.
My mom thought it was the most beautiful window she ever saw.
One Thursday after school, while mom and dad were still at work, my neighbor Johnny Rumao grabbed the aluminum bat and his dad’s leather mitt and set up for batting practice.
I was in the zone that day. The way athletes talk about the world falling away and all you feel is the game. Just you, the pitcher, the ball, and silence. I crushed 4 hits in a row onto the deck - a feat never accomplished before.
I felt cocky. I pointed my bat to the sky and hit Johnny with some trash talk. “Pack up kid (he was 5 or 6 years older than me). This one’s going over the house.”
He threw. I swung. I didn’t feel the bat hit the ball, but I heard the twang of the aluminum. And I saw where it was going.
I thought the whole world probably heard the shattering glass. Johnny ran home. I went inside and sat, sweating, deciding what to do. I was terrified.
When mom got home I cried. I told her what happened. I told her I’d cut the grass for the rest of my life to make up for it. And she said it was alright. We’d find a way to fix it as best we could together.
So we put in a plain window. And she kept the shards in a box. I don’t know what happened to them after that.
But what stuck with me is the importance of facing hard conversations directly and honestly. If I'd hidden it or pretended to be surprised when she noticed, things would have gone very differently. There would have been anger and frustration.
And that’s the theme of this month’s newsletter. The hard conversations we need to have in the lab industry around the supply chain. Getting essential supplies to labs when labs need them. Not stringing lab managers along with unrealistic delivery dates. And not clinging to brand loyalty when productivity is at stake.
The supply chain will be stuck on third for years
There are a few ways manufacturers are dealing with the supply chain challenges that have mudded everything up over the last 2 years.
Some are aggressively increasing capacity and localizing manufacturing as much as possible, so shipping products over great distances doesn’t remain the status quo.
Over the last couple years, Pharmco, for example, has added manufacturing capacity overseas and in the USA. More about them below.
When our chromatography vials and closures manufacturer started giving lead times of 6-months, you needed better.
Macherey-Nagel strategically sourced glass tubing as the pandemic grew, and met hugely increased demand without extending lead times.
Other manufacturers gave best-case scenario delivery dates and pushed them back repeatedly.
You’ve probably experienced that recently.
So here’s the tough conversation part. You might not be able to get the exact supplies you want in a reasonable amount of time. And you’re going to waste a lot of time trying to get them.
Even Mike Schmidt got stranded on base from time to time. You can only control what you can control.
We suggest you ask us to do that work for you.
We have 80+ year relationships with manufacturers. Which means we can get realistic and honest ETAs on product availability.
And when we have those ETAs, if they don’t fit with your timeline, we can get you good alternatives that fit your need.
It saves you the legwork and keeps your lab productive when others are waiting for orders that are still 6-months away.
Contact us below and tell us what you need. We’ll tell you when you can actually get it, and give you the alternatives that can get to you sooner.
Longer-term planning could be your grand slam
We recently agreed to work more closely with Pharmco (Greenfield Global) to get a better selection of solvents, reagent alcohol, and specially denatured alcohols to our customers in the northeast.
Over the last 24 months, we’ve seen firsthand how hard the team at Pharmco is working to get orders to labs on time.
They’ve been particularly good at two things:
Giving accurate ETAs.
Being honest about delays.
And that lines up with our values (and probably yours too).
So here’s how you hit a grand slam with your solvents, reagent alcohol, specially denatured alcohols, and other chemicals over the next 12 months.
Contact us with a ballpark idea of the chemicals and volumes you expect to use.
Let us do the work with Pharmco and other chemical manufacturers to map out your year’s shipments.
High five your colleagues when you learn you can get all your chemicals from multiple vendors with very few logsital issues (and very little of your own time spent setting it up).
You can look at your chemicals on our website below. But that’s only a fraction of the supplies we have for you.
So if you don’t find what you need at the link below, just give us a call.
Striking out with glassware?
It used to be easy to get the test tubes and beakers and Erlenmeyer, Florence, and Kjeldahl flasks you needed when you needed them.
It used to be easy to get the chromatography vials and closures you use all day, too.
But as you know, demand for all glassware increased by 200% or more almost overnight.
When our U.S. manufacturer of chromatography vials and closures went into a tailspin, increasing lead times to 6-months, we turned to Macherey-Nagel.
They found new strategic sources for glass tubing.
This allowed them to meet demand for chromatography vials and caps, which helped our customers greatly.
Macherey-Nagel keeps a huge, stable supply of vials and caps in its warehouse in Allentown, PA. An easy location for shipping logistics across the northeast.
And for customers waiting on flasks and other glassware, we came up with a novel solution.
The broken glassware that normally gets trashed or recycled from your lab can get repaired quickly.
Just send us a picture or give us a call about it and we’ll help find the best solution.
If I could have had my mom’s window repaired without her noticing it was broken in the first place, you better believe I would have done it!
Jack Russel or Lab?
I don’t know whether to get a Jack Russel or a Lab...
Because I really like dogs, but I also really like having a place to do experiments.
That one’s for all the dads out there. Keep telling those dad jokes!
Joking aside. The places where you do your experiments don’t have the same kind of supply-certainty that existed just 2 years ago.
And going straight to the manufacturer will get you put into a queue.
Your best bet is to work with a local distributor who can get real ETAs, knows the true alternatives to your products on backorder, and can put time into the work you don’t have time to do.
That way, when supply chains are back to normal in a few years, you, your colleagues, and the rest of us will still have thriving places to do experiments.
And we won't have to have too many hard conversations again.
Can’t find what you need on our website?
We stock thousands of SKUs that aren’t available online. Get in touch with our team for preferred pricing on everything you need.