Northwest Pathology is a leading provider of pathology services based out of Bellingham, Washington. At present day, Northwest Pathology uses Quartzy to keep their labs up-to-date on all things lab management related, but things weren’t always so streamlined.

Rewind to July 2014, when lab manager Jeremy Johnston came across Quartzy while searching for an antibody online. Face-to-face with an upcoming order due date, Jeremy was deep in their old, painstaking processes: printing a 6 page spreadsheet; walking about the lab with pencil in hand, recalling his mental thresholds of each item as he took note of what needed to be reordered; physically handing the log to Karen in purchasing; waiting patiently through unreported backorders and inundated with duplicate orders, to no fault of anyone’s but the poor process to which they had grown accustomed.

Acutely aware of the inefficiencies of their existing process, Jeremy was immediately intrigued by Quartzy. An online platform that boasted order tracking and communication as well as inventory management and unlimited data storage, all the while remaining free to use? He had to learn more. After creating an account and exploring, he sent an email to a colleague whom he trusted to bounce the idea off of—what if they adopted Quartzy to manage their ordering and keep track of inventory?

Quartzy quickly gained traction in the eyes of the higherups at Northwest Pathology; Quartzy was a web-based database that fit their needs. Accessible from anywhere, it offered the ability to store unlimited data and attach and consolidate relevant documents and resources. Quartzy centralized order communication and provided fast and reliably competitive price quotes. In short, everything was in one place. Plus, as Jeremy likes to say, “It’s hard to argue with free!”

Jeremy knew he had to propose a plan to implement Quartzy while the iron was hot–people were eager for a solution. After a demo of the platform and a productive conversation with Monica, a Quartzy Support specialist, Northwest Pathology was ready to migrate to Quartzy.

With organization in sight and the attentive support of Monica, the migration was fast and efficient. Years later, Jeremy still has glowing words about the Support team. “I have NEVER had to wait more than 1 day to get a response on anything,” he says. “Typically, I receive an answer to any question I’ve had within a few hours… or minutes! Exceptional!”

Quartzy’s versatility and flexibility allows for easy integration with popular tools, such as the Kanban cards used by Northwest Pathology. Able to integrate widely and easily with a variety of methods, Quartzy can be configured by any organization to fit its own needs.

A new era has emerged at Northwest Pathology: orders run smoothly, redundancy is obsolete, and order workflow is less manual. The labs run at maximum capacity without hiccups. Karen, the company’s Bookkeeper and Purchaser, now groups items into a P.O., checks invoices to see if every item has come in, and pays invoices efficiently and with certainty. She even wrote a grateful email to her team, saying, “This is really helping my processes—it makes entering bills more timely. Thanks so much for implementing this!”

In addition to the immediate organizational benefits, other features have had a drastic impact on Northwest Pathology. Quartzy’s Effortless Quotes and Shop features have saved Northwest Pathology $4,114.70 on lab supplies, not to mention the savings that have accumulated with the eradication of the all-too-frequent duplicate and incorrect orders of the past.

What supplies do we need? Are my kits here yet? For Northwest Pathology, those questions are a thing of the past. “When we began using Quartzy I told our Board that we had an easy out if it didn’t work out: we could just export our data and go back to the drawing board,” says Jeremy. “But all it took was the first order with Quartzy and we never had that thought again.”