Customer Story

By: Maya Desai

A lean, ambitious Waltham, MA-based biotechnology startup is using Quartzy to save time and stay organized. This ensures they can focus on their research. In only one year, and despite the COVID-19 pandemic, their team has nearly quadrupled in size, from three founders to an eleven-person crew. For such a small crew, every hour is precious.
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From its inception, this company’s co-founders had their eyes on Quartzy. “They were working as a three-person skeleton crew, but they knew they wanted to use Quartzy,” explains the lab manager. Those early days were consumed with building out a research laboratory from scratch. But as soon as the cornerstone equipment was in place and the team had settled into a groove, they set up their Quartzy account and all began using it regularly.
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Their lab manager estimates that Quartzy saves his company a lot of time—and that’s when everything goes well. When errors pop up, Quartzy shines. “It’s very useful for me to have Quartzy there because it absolves me of certain issues,” he explains. Quartzy’s automated system significantly reduces the potential for error, and when there is an error, Quartzy makes it easy to identify what happened and reduces the time that would be spent tracking down the source of the error and remedying it.

For example, without Quartzy, they would use hard copy paper Purchase Orders, which introduces many opportunities for mistakes. “If I have a stack on my desk and I’m typing things in, I’m going to make an error at some point. There’s no way around it,” their lab manager says. But with Quartzy, the middleman is cut out, and with it a significant source of error is removed. If the wrong item is ordered, a rare occurrence these days, it may be due to a lab member making a simple mistake, and not because anyone incorrectly transcribed a PO form or erred whilst working with a third-party digital PO form. “If a lab is using paper POs, I would tell them that’s clunky and that shouldn’t be done,” says the lab manager. “Quartzy skips a lot of those steps.”
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The entire team saves time because of Quartzy’s streamlined process for ordering supplies. “If you multiply it by the number of people, that’s tens of hours. I would say overall it saves upwards of a dozen hours a week in total,” estimates the lab manager. For an eleven-person company, a dozen hours a week is a significant amount of employee time that can now be devoted to research instead of paperwork.

During the COVID-19 crisis, Quartzy’s customer support team has helped the startup navigate a myriad of questions and unforeseen supply chain issues. In one incident, gloves were so scarce and shipments were so delayed that the company ordered gloves from multiple suppliers. “Once we got the gloves in hand, Quartzy support was really nice and worked with me to cancel some orders,” said their lab manager.
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As they continue to grow, the lab manager will be in charge of onboarding new team members to Quartzy. Thankfully, he won’t be alone in this. Quartzy offers support and resources for training new users, yet another way to free up valuable time so our users can fry bigger fish.