The Hidden Risk in Your Lab Budget: Consumable Cost Creep
What would you do if you found out you were paying 483% more for consumables?
Here’s a tip: If you want to make a meaningful operational improvement quickly, start by checking the health of your consumable spend.
Most organizations track major capital expenditures closely; for instance, new analytical instruments, manufacturing equipment, facility upgrades. But the smaller, routine purchases that keep those systems running often receive far less scrutiny.
Over time, those small purchases often become a major financial drain.
This phenomenon is commonly known as cost creep.
What Does Cost Creep Look Like?
Picture this.
You’ve been working with a manufacturing supplier for years. The analytical equipment performs well, and the consumables required to run the system have always been purchased without much concern.
Then someone performs a quick internal check.
A box of tips that cost a certain amount in 2025 is now 25% more expensive in 2026.
Curious, you decide to review a few additional items…pipette tips, cuvettes, and a handful of commonly used consumables.
You’ve now confirmed a pattern. Prices have gradually increased across multiple products over several years.
Individually, each increase seemed small enough to ignore. Collectively, however, the impact is significant.
Why This Matters More Than Most People Realize
Runaway consumable spend is one of the most overlooked contributors to budget constraints and project delays.
When the cost of routine consumables increases:
Operational budgets tighten.
Less capital is available for new or redundant CAPEX equipment.
Expansion initiatives slow down.
Teams delay investing in improvements unless a critical need arises (often not a good idea).
Over time, this creates significant delays and reshapes how quickly organizations can move.
Where Cost Creep Usually Comes From
In many cases, cost creep originates at the vendor and procurement level.
It typically occurs through:
Small price increases across dozens or hundreds of SKUs.
Purchases flowing through multiple distributors or service providers.
Missing negotiated contract pricing.
Manual purchasing processes that bypass preferred suppliers.
Third-party distribution markups that go unnoticed
When you don’t have a full picture of the purchasing process, the total impact often remains hidden for years.
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Here’s A Real Example We Encountered Last Week
A customer we spoke with recently was purchasing wiper rings through a third-party distributor for $3,500 per pack.
When they asked the distributor about the price, they were told:
“Unfortunately, that’s just what the price is.”
The customer then reached out to confirm pricing directly with the manufacturer.
The actual list price was just over $600.
Using a standard markup calculation:
((Selling Price - Cost) / Cost) times 100
***The markup in this case was approximately 483%. WTF?!***
The crazy part is this isn’t unusual when procurement flows through multiple layers of distribution. It also highlights how easily cost creep can spiral out of control without maintaining visibility.
The Issue Associated with Visibility
One of the biggest challenges we see across labs and manufacturing organizations is:
Most teams do not have clear visibility into their total consumable spend. They just don’t.
Purchases often flow through:
Multiple distributors
Third-party service companies
Vendor contracts
Individual purchasing decisions across departments
Without a centralized review, cost creep can accumulate for years.
A Simple First Step
At The Biokive Consultancy Group, we run quick Consumable Spend Analyses to help organizations:
Identify where their consumables budget is actually going.
Spot pricing inconsistencies across vendors.
Highlight items with excessive markups.
Create more efficient purchasing strategies
Often, organizations discover meaningful savings within the first review.
When making big improvements in the workplace, a misconception is to first go after big ticket items. While monitoring CAPEX equipment projects is one way to help lower costs or mitigate risks associated with long-term spend, the largest improvements generally come from optimizing what you’re already buying on a routine basis.
Contact us to learn more about our Consumable Spend Review. This would be a good way to present immediate savings and a good starting point for improving existing supplier relationships internally:
👉 https://www.thebiokive.com/supplier-insights
