Global supply chains for lab consumables and reagents have been under more pressure over the past few years than most people in the industry had seen before, and a lot of that pressure hasn’t fully gone away. Tariff changes, freight cost swings, and manufacturing concentrated in just a handful of regions all still shape how reliably consumables and reagents actually reach your bench.
For labs here in New Zealand, the Pacific, and Australia, there’s an added layer: we’re a long way from most manufacturing hubs, and shipping delays or customs holds hit us differently than they might a lab in the US or Europe.
So what does a genuinely resilient supply setup actually look like, practically speaking?
A bit of flexibility on your side goes a long way
How your own ordering is set up plays an important part in building resilience. Running consumables right down to the last box before reordering leaves no room to absorb even a short delay. Building in a bit of buffer on the items your lab genuinely can’t do without, and timing orders around known busy periods (end of financial year, semester starts, or seasonal testing spikes) rather than waiting until something’s urgent, takes a surprising amount of pressure off when something upstream does shift.
This doesn’t need to mean holding a lot of extra stock. Even just reviewing which handful of products would actually stop your work if they ran out, and keeping a slightly longer lead time in mind for those specifically, makes a real difference.
Talk to your supplier
A lot of lab ordering can run on habit: reorder when stock gets low, based on how things have gone in the past. That works fine until something changes upstream, and by the time it shows up as a delay on your end, it’s already too late to plan around it.
The suppliers themselves are usually sitting on far more useful information than any individual lab has visibility into. They’re watching lead times shift across manufacturers, seeing which product lines are tightening up before it becomes obvious, and forming a view on what’s likely to stay reliable versus what’s worth planning around early. That’s exactly the kind of insight worth asking for directly, rather than only finding out once an order’s delayed.
It’s something we lean into at Interlab. Our team is regularly talking with our supplier network about lead times and forecasting, and we’d rather flag a potential issue with a customer early than have them find out the hard way when an order doesn’t arrive. If you’re planning ahead on a particular product line, it’s worth asking us what we’re seeing.
Someone you can actually call
When something does go sideways, the difference between a minor delay and a genuine problem often comes down to how quickly you can get a straight answer. Dealing directly with an overseas manufacturer on a delay or a backorder usually means time zone gaps, a generic support inbox, and very little visibility into what’s actually happening.
Working with a local team closes that gap. Our sales staff can chase up a status directly rather than you waiting on an email reply from the other side of the world. For labs across the Pacific and in Australia in particular, where freight and customs timelines already add complexity, having a local point of contact who understands those routes tends to matter more than people expect until they need it.
None of this needs to be complicated. If you’re reviewing your own ordering setup and want a sense of what’s coming down the line for a particular product or category, our sales team is happy to talk it through.
