LabManager Magazine – which, by the way, is an outstanding source for current trends in Lab Management – conducted an interview with Jon Webb, after he held the webinar “How to Find and Fix the Top Eight Lab Chemical Management Errors.”. Jon is a senior technical specialist and inventory consultant for ChemSW and has many years of experience with chemical inventory management.

I highly recommend reading the interview as well as watching the recorded webinar. It will give you a great overview about inventory management. I agree in every point Jon mentioned. Although, I do not think that a barcoded inventory is mandatory. I believe that small and midsized labs can also have decent inventory management systems without barcoding. The barcoding function is surely nice to have, but it is usually more expensive implementing such systems. Furthermore, even the best barcoding system does not help you if it is not used properly. And making your freezers accesible only after scanning a bar code, is surely not a process you would like to establish in a small lab. It would be too expensive to implement and your staff would get frustrated quickly. Processes should always fit the individual requirements, and should never be stricter then necessary.

You find the interview with Jon Webb here:

http://www.labmanager.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34051/title/Fixing-the-Top-8-Lab-Chemical-Management-Errors/

You can watch the recorded webinar here:

http://www.labmanager.com/?articles.view/articleNo/30115/title/Webinar--How-to-Find-and-Fix-the-Top-8-Lab-Chemical-Management-Errors/