Feature drop · Atlas OS
Seven months, then three seconds
What happens when there is no longer a person sitting between a question and a binding quotation.
On Friday at 08:39:26, Atlas OS created a customer account and an order. At 08:39:28 the quotation existed as a PDF; at 08:39:29 it was with the customer. Nobody on our side was at a computer during that time, and nobody needed to be.
08:39:26
Customer account and order
08:39:28
Quotation document
08:39:29
Email to the customer
Friday · without human intervention
The order came from a university research group: five samples of CytoScan HD including DNA isolation, placed in the configurator, at the publicly listed price, without registering first. The account is a by-product of the order, not a precondition for it. Nobody signs up in order to buy something. The order then sits in the portal: status, documents, and later the result data to download.
The seven months before those three seconds are the more interesting part. The question about price came in January; in February five samples were on hand, with the clinical data from a collaboration still missing. The order was placed in August, when it suited the customer, and it was exactly those five samples. Not one of those days was spent waiting on us.
The bottleneck in the laboratory business is rarely demand. It sits between “what does this cost” and “here is the binding quotation”. In this industry that gap is usually staffed by a person who prices a line item, writes a document and sends it — during office hours, in a sequence that other business helps determine. As long as that person sits there, the customer does not order when they are ready, but when we are.
01
The second case
The first order was a closing, not a find. We had known the customer since January, and the configurator finished what was running anyway. The second came the following Monday at 14:52, for 96 samples, from an institute we had never spoken to. Order, quotation and email came about without us again, and the quotation page was opened the same afternoon. One case shows the machine runs. Two show that it does not only serve the customers we already had.
02
We measure an order in latencies
01
Question to quotation
3 s02
Acceptance to goods-in
03
Goods-in to data
04
Data to invoice
0 sThe first link is now three seconds. The other three are next, and we will publish them as soon as there are enough orders for an average to mean anything.
The second link carries the physical part, and that is the genuinely hard one. A sample is not a parcel: it has a route, a chain of custody and a cooling budget, and how we calculate that is here. The fourth link carries a rule we set ourselves: the invoice goes out the moment the data is in the portal. Not before.
03
Why this is not a LIMS
A LIMS runs a laboratory from the inside. Atlas OS orders molecular biology from the outside. Institutions get their own instance at their own address, with their own user management, their own appearance and their own documents. A research group sees its own orders and its own result data, not the neighbouring institute's — with genetic data that is not a question of comfort.
04
For partners
Anyone who brings customers is in the system rather than in a side agreement: a code, an attribution, a share of the invoice that was actually paid. One line to partners@atlasbiolabs.com is enough; we create the code the same day.
The prices are public, and the configurator arrives at the same total we would. Anyone who wants to know what five samples cost does not have to ask us. Nor does anyone who wants to order.