April 2015
April 27, 2015
The Tip of The Day
Part One
Back in May of 2013, we talked about the use of third party tips on liquid handling robots. Well, we got a lot of emails on that one as it seems a lot of people are looking for alternative tip providers, for a number of reasons...but mostly cost savings.
We heard a lot of stories regarding OEM's who threatened to void instrument warranties or even refuse to service instruments that use third party tips. Is that legal? Probably not but, it certainly is unwise and I would imagine that is not a company policy so much as it is a regional sales rep or service engineer who does not want to lose a lucrative revenue stream.
Having worked on the supplier side (at Caliper Life Sciences, now part of Perkin Elmer), I can tell you that most OEM's want end users to buy their tips...and only their tips. Why is that? Well, the biggest reason is that they have invested heavily in the creation of precision injection molds and the logistics required to stock and ship tips. This is not inconsequential and often explains why OEM tips tend to cost more than third party tips. Even when the mold costs have been amortized, stocking and distributing tips is a costly endeavor, as is ongoing quality monitoring.
So, you might be asking, how could a third party tip cause an instrument to fail? The only conceivable scenarios I can think of are:
a) head crashes due to physical differences or
b) 0-rings on mandrels that might wear or deform due to physical differences (polymers or dimensions).
Other than that, it's really a red-herring argument. Our sister division, AssayGuru has performed performance analysis on a number of third party tips for various manufacturers and compared both pipetting accuracy and mechanical reliability. These tests were conducted on various brands of liquid handling robots using both third party and OEM tips. In most cases, there have been no issues and the third party manufacturers we have worked with were eager to find and correct any flaws, prior to launching their tip products.
In my next post, I will detail one such manufacturer who has impressed us so much that we have actually created a new partnership...stay tuned.
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