Case Study: Chemical Inventory Management Solutions for the Academic Research Laboratory

A common problem faced by many academic research labs is how to keep track of bulk chemicals, equipment, and solvents. Who has taken the item, what condition the item is in when it is returned, and does it need to be reordered are just a few of the questions that need to be answered in order to avoid confusion and frustration.

Some of the ways in which ACD/Labs' inventory management software, ACD/ChemFolder, can help solve the chemical inventory management woes of a research group are presented below.

Often groups find it difficult to keep track of what reagents are being lent out in an efficient and logical manner. A Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet may be used to keep this information, but in order to locate the compounds people are interested in borrowing, you would have to type in the exact name(s) or identification number(s) for each compound and hope that you didn't make any spelling mistakes.

Using ChemFolder, you can create a database of all the bulk reagents your research group has, including the chemical structure for each compound, along with the reagent's name and additional fields of relevant information. To find a compound, any of your group members can simply open the inventory system, draw a structure fragment characteristic of the compound of interest, such as a simple ketone or aldehyde group, and then retrieve a list of all of the reagents in their storeroom that matched the search criteria. This list of database "hits" can then be flipped through until the sought-after compound is located, and marked as either "borrowed" or "present". Each database record may contain optional information, such as a place to create a note when the compound needs to be reordered.

This implementation in a client research group of ACD/Labs' has proven to be a huge improvement over previous inventory management attempts. In particular, the available substructure search has made locating and tracking down compounds a great deal more efficient. With the ability to simply draw and search for a portion of the compound of interest, our client research group no longer has to worry about typing in the exact compound name or identification number.

Other features that research groups can take advantage of are the barcode generation and search capabilities built into ChemFolder through ACD/ChemCoder. By having the software automatically generate and print out barcodes containing the chemical structure and user data for each entry in your inventory database, you will be able to affix these labels to each of your group's reagent bottles so that when a member of your department returns a borrowed bottle, you can simply scan the attached barcode to regenerate the chemical structure and automatically search it against the opened database. ChemCoder will return the exact record for each compound so that you will be able to update the compound's information almost instantly.