As budgets tighten across life sciences, many R&D organisations have realised their biggest source of waste isn’t in their science, but their operations. Johannes Solzbach, CEO and co-founder at Calira, believes greater visibility of equipment usage data can help labs protect productivity without new investment.
Across the biopharma industry, the pressure to reduce costs has never been higher. Large-scale layoffs, spending freezes, and ROI mandates have become common. Yet, for most R&D leaders, the question isn’t whether to cut costs, but how to do it without slowing discovery.
For lab operations, this is a daily balancing act. Facilities can’t simply turn off instruments or pause research: scientists still need access to the right tools, at the right time, and leadership expects the same level of output with fewer resources. The challenge, then, is to make the infrastructure of R&D more efficient and do more with what already exists.
The (surprisingly high) hidden costs of idle equipment
When a biopharma company buys new instruments, those purchases are treated as investments in future discovery. But in many labs, that capital sits idle. McKinsey estimates that lab equipment in biopharma is used at only about 35% of its capacity. The other 65% represents wasted opportunity and wasted capital.
Idle instruments also create knock-on costs. When demand spikes, teams will often buy more instead of redistributing what they already have.
This manifests as duplicate purchases between sites, buildouts of new spaces to house underused tools, and facility budgets stretched to breaking point. This waste isn’t visible in most reporting because few organisations have structured data on how equipment is actually used.
The result is that CapEx waste accumulates quietly. A handful of instruments left idle each week can add up to millions in inefficiency each year. One top 10 pharma company I recently spoke to estimated roughly $9.5 million in annual inefficiency from poor equipment utilisation alone.
What’s the source of this CapEx waste?
Many would jump to blaming this waste on neglect, but in reality, it comes from fragmentation. Many labs rely on spreadsheets, shared Outlook calendars, or even paper sign-up sheets to coordinate access to critical instruments.
But of course, spreadsheets and shared calendars aren’t designed for how modern R&D operations function today across multiple teams, sites, and time zones.
The result is that few, if any, have a complete and accurate view of what’s really going on.
Lab managers spend hours mediating booking conflicts or chasing down availability: scientists get frustrated when they can’t book what they need: finance teams struggle to see where assets are sitting idle: and leadership can’t make data-driven CapEx decisions because the data simply doesn’t exist.
Even in organisations that have invested heavily in digital transformation, this gap remains. ELNs and LIMS systems track experiments and samples, but they don’t track equipment usage. IoT data can show when a machine is turned on, but not who is using it, or for what purpose.
Why R&D equipment visibility is now a strategic issue
In the past, these inefficiencies have been seen more as an administrative nuisance; annoying, but tolerable. That’s no longer the case.
As budgets tighten, visibility into how equipment is used has become a strategic necessity. Without it, R&D leaders risk making multimillion-dollar decisions in the dark.
Operationally, usage data helps labs understand which instruments are bottlenecks and which are underused.
Financially, it supports ROI accountability and strengthens business cases for future investment. Strategically, it allows leaders to demonstrate to shareholders that their capital is being used effectively.
With reliable usage data, labs can identify excess capacity, consolidate equipment across sites, and defer unnecessary purchases. In a cost-conscious climate, that’s a powerful lever.
From administrative task to strategic control layer
Leading R&D organisations are beginning to treat equipment scheduling not as an admin function, but as a strategic control layer. When bookings are centralised and tracked, labs gain real-time visibility into who uses what, when, and how often. This turns what was once a blind spot into actionable data.
The impact is measurable. Across thousands of labs, centralised booking systems have been shown to improve utilisation by 10 to 15 percentage points within the first year. That gain doesn’t come from new hardware or new hires, but instead from better coordination of what’s already there.
With centralised systems, lab managers can see utilisation trends at a glance. Operations leaders can reallocate assets instead of buying new ones. Finance teams can quantify ROI. Scientists can book instruments without friction. And leadership can finally make confident, data-backed decisions about future investments.
Making cost control part of R&D’s DNA
Doing more with less is less about austerity and more simply about control. The labs that thrive in this new environment will be those that use visibility to make smarter, faster decisions about where and how to spend. That means treating operational data with the same seriousness as scientific data.
A structured approach to equipment booking is one of the simplest, cheapest, and most effective ways to get there. It connects people, instruments, and data in a way that makes R&D operations measurable, predictable, and scalable. And when every dollar counts, that’s hard to ignore.
calira.co
