The Eisco Supply Chain Advantage

I have been toying with the idea of writing blog articles for some time. As always a
1001 excuses have come in the way of me starting this from being busy in my usual
day to day work to not wanting to be seen to be jumping on the fashionable Blog
bandwagon which seems to be on every other LinkedIn post I see.

So, I have settled on starting my blogging adventure with the rather dry topic of
Supply Chain. When we have an almost unlimited range of (exciting) science
products to look Supply Chain seems a strange way to start but its an often over
looked part of the offering we have here at Eisco. So Supply Chain for Eisco
customers (and I write this as former Eisco customer of over 15 years) can look like
a combination of the following Added Value topics:

Supplier Consolidation

When I first started in the industry as a Product Manager in the early 2000s. At the
time the big fashion from management (apart from price) was on ‘range reduction’.
The well known 80-20 rule with the theory being that if 20% of your range gave you
80% of your income then why waste time and resource managing a huge tail of
products and suppliers. Coming from a science background (Physics for my sins) I
and some of my other science background colleagues knew that science
laboratories could not operate without the once every 10 year purchase of this
widget or spare part. As a major supplier if you did not have these less fashionable
parts then your customers would move their business to other suppliers where they
could buy their regular consumables and the more niche items all in one go.

With a catalog of over 23,500 product SKUs—the majority of which are manufactured in-house—Eisco stands out as a unique partner in the industry. We combine the competitive pricing of a manufacturer with the extensive product range of a wholesaler, delivering exceptional value and variety to our customers. By offering everything from USP-certified volumetric glassware to anatomical models and school electricity kits, Eisco provides a truly comprehensive range for education-focused distributors. Many of our partners have already benefited from this broad selection — with some even consolidating over 100 different suppliers into a single partnership with Eisco, all while maintaining a complete 'One Stop Shop' product portfolio.

Range consolidation is a common and valuable strategy in the education market—and with our with our continued and strategic expansion into the industrial and scientific sector, Eisco is significantly broadening its product portfolio. This is a significant advantage for our industrial and scientific distributors as well. Distributors no longer need to fill entire containers with a single product category (such as plasticware). Instead, our industrial customers can now consolidate thousands of SKUs across a diverse range—from USP volumetric glassware to disposable plastics and stainless steel metalware—all from a single, trusted source.

We Carry Stock

When I first started buying products from India and the Far East everything was
made to order with a standard lead time of 3 – 4 months for manufacture plus another month (or more) for shipping by sea. In many cases the situation still exists today. This means huge inventories with cash tied up in stock, high product MOQs and poor product service levels as spikes in demand lead to out of stocks for prolonged periods. At Eisco we carry over $4M worth of finished stock in our headquarters in India – thousands of our top selling lines ready to be picked. What this means for our customers is that we regularly ship out orders within 3-4 weeks rather than months. An order into Europe by sea can often be delivered within 8-10 weeks rather than the 16-20 weeks offered by traditional manufacturers. That’s a lot of inventory our distributors don’t need to carry PLUS by holding stock we don’t insist on product MOQs. You can make up an order of 500 lines by ordering one unit of each. Further to our inventory in India, we also carry similar levels of stock circa $3M worth of stock in our US headquarters ensuring our distributors in North America benefit from even better lead times. Whether it be sourcing from India or
the US, our stock levels further reduce the inventory you need to carry and makes it
easier to consolidate more lines with us – I think this is called a ‘win-win’ in some
business textbooks!

Getting the Goods to You

As a Purchasing Manager in a former life I regularly had to spend hours chasing my
UK forwarder to chase his agent in the Far East to contact my supplier to arrange a
pick up – often things were lost in translation or sat on an agents desk for a week
before they would act adding to already long lead times.

Eisco take the headache out of freight – we ship over 600 containers per year by sea and thousands of smaller shipments by both sea and airfreight. Because of our volumes we get the best rates with the shipping lines and airfreight companies. A full container delivered into Europe can be just 4 or 5% of the value of goods shipped. Whether you want an urgent courier shipment for delivery next week or a full 40ft container sending by sea our Logistics team offer end to end delivery which we charge at cost. Onsite Customs clearance, Full documentation, insurance and tracking is all part of our service – all you have to do is receive the shipment!

SAP Driven Logistics to Help

In 2023 we updated all of our in-house logistics systems to SAP. It was a steep
learning curve for our team the details of which may be discussed in depth in a future
blog but for now its suffice to say we can offer our distributors with full packing and
labelling solutions. To give just some examples we can add your company logo,
product barcodes, Webshop links, customised or translated descriptions all to the
product packaging before we ship your goods. We have seen that this can save our
customers' Goods In teams as much as 2-3 weeks of man hours in not having to label or sift through our deliveries!

Conclusion

So looking at the above I hope you can get a flavour for how we are more than just a
manufacturer. Taking into account the above we are pretty convinced that our End to
End / Landed Product costs are amongst the best in the business. Many still focus solely on the ex-factory price, overlooking the hidden costs of longer lead times, managing multiple suppliers, high MOQs, unexpected delays, rising shipping costs, and the significant time and effort spent by internal teams coordinating it all.

This is where the Eisco Supply Chain Advantage comes in—helping our partners reduce complexity, save time, and optimize costs through a streamlined, consolidated sourcing solution.

Thanks for reading – many congratulations if you got this far. I hope you found it
interesting!

About the Author

Graeme Coleman is Eisco's General Manager for Business Development in Europe.
Prior to his 3 years (and counting) at Eisco he worked for 18 years in the Laboratory
Supplies market in the UK covering a range of positions from Product Manager/Buyer to Marketing, Sales and Business Improvement.