About Instant Quote

Instant Quote is an end-to-end online solution for quote generation, ordering and tracking. It basically spans the whole procurement process that is painful and time-consuming and scientists hate it. It helps to find the best offer for a selected set of compounds and get them delivered to your lab.

We have developed Instant Quote to make life easier for scientists working on drug discovery projects or just ended up with a task to procure multiple compounds. We went through this a few times ourselves and we didn't like it. It takes so much time to contact and negotiate with suppliers, check the availability of compounds, try to calculate the best combination of products and suppliers, consider project deadlines, etc. To eliminate these painful parts of compound procurement was part of the Mcule mission.

Benefits

The main benefits in a nutshell: Instant Quote eliminates e-mail communications from the whole process, thus it saves valuable time for scientists and procurement managers. Its unique algorithm calculates the best price and fastest delivery quotes in a minute. It can greatly reduce costs by comparing and optimizing compound prices, supplier discounts, small order fees, delivery costs, customs duties and reformatting options.

Here is how it works

If you have created a collection containing your selected compounds, just click on the orange Quote in the top right corner of collections. We will ask for some basic information required for quote calculation. For example, you can specify the preferred and the acceptable minimum amounts per compound, min. purity, max. delivery time and the supplier catalogs (grouped by stock information up-to-dateness) to be included in the quote calculation. You can also select the delivery format here. We can implement any customer-defined formatting option to Instant Quote in a few days and it will be displayed in your personal account. This can be particularly interesting for organizations frequently ordering in a special format (custom vials / plates, DMSO solutions, etc.). After filling out the Quote form, the best price and fastest delivery quotes will be calculated on-the-fly.

The algorithm

We developed a unique optimization algorithm which calculates the best price and fastest delivery quotes by comparing and optimizing compound prices, supplier discounts, small order fees, delivery costs, customs duties and reformatting options. Since the same compound is typically available from multiple suppliers and there are many parameters to consider during quote generation, the manual price and delivery time optimization could be very challenging even for a relatively small order. Additionally, requesting stock availability information is time-consuming especially when the information has to be requested by e-mail.

Our unique quote generation algorithm first automatically checks the stock availability for your selected suppliers. For almost 6M products we have access to the supplier's current stock levels that makes Instant Quote generation particularly reliable. In the next step, our algorithm finds the best product matches by minimizing the total price and the delivery time. Instant Quote generation typically takes 1-2 minutes even for thousands of compounds. After the optimization algorithm finishes the generated quotes will appear in the Quote list view.

The quotes

You first get a quick summary that we call the Quote list view. We list here the best price and the fastest delivery offers separately if the two differ. Click on “See details” to see the break down of the total price of the individual quotes and most importantly to fine-tune the quote by excluding particular compounds. After you selected the products you want to remove, click on the “Remove selected and recalculate” button and a new quote will be generated for the remaining products on-the-fly.




You can fine-tune the quotes based on Effective price, stock availability and purity information. After you finalized your quote, you can save it and export it in PDF or Excel formats. You can go back any time when you are ready to place the order. Optionally, you can specify a Purchase Order number and upload a PO file issued by your company / institution.

Order tracking

After you placed the order, you can track its status online by checking its unique URL. You can also request status updates and we will email you when the status of your order gets updated.

Delivery

All your ordered products will be delivered to you as a single package and we provide complete EU and US customs clearance service (customs duties and taxes are paid by us). Mcule does not charge any hidden customs costs to its customers.

Test Instant Quote!

If you would like to test Instant Quote, you can freely access it until 31/03/2014. To get started, run a quick compound search on Mcule!

For more information on Instant Quote, please check our brochure and quick user guide.

What would you rather do?

 

If you like administration, please stop reading now.

Otherwise, find out more about Mcule's brand new product: INSTANT QUOTE. It will make screening compound ordering a joy.

Have a great day!

The Mcule Team

New features and new pricing

We are after a very interesting development period with several interesting features and changes, so here is what's new on Mcule:

NEW FEATURES

1. New navigation menu

We revised our menu to make it more straightforward. Now we have grouped things as follows:

• Hit Identification (things for virtual screening and library design - primarily based on Workflow Builder including pre-populated workflow templates, plus the Database Download page)
• Lead Optimization (these are the popular 1-Click Applications for quick validation of chemistry ideas by docking, property profiling and toxicity checking plus the scaffold hop idea generator)
• Find Chemicals (basic searching options for a single or multiple queries)
• Collections (you know this one already - you can find all your search results here)
• Instant Quotes (this one is new, see more below).

2. Instant quote

This is going to be a killer feature for compound procurement managers and it does what it says: Instant Quote generates price and delivery time quotes on-the-fly for a set of compounds. We have a nice brochure on this, and a more detailed blog post is coming soon on this feature. But here is a few words because we are really psyched about it:

You can make a compound selection by using some of the basic searching tools (Find Chemicals) or run e.g. a virtual screen, click on Quote, fill out a short quote form, and Instant Quote will generate a quote on-the-fly. And this is great! Here is why: we check the availability of all potential products that can be included in your quote on-the-fly (we have live and batch stock availability handlers for most of our suppliers). Plus (and this is the big deal) we solve a serious combinatorial problem of matching particular products to each of your selected compounds. This is not trivial, just think of 10 compounds, and 5 potential suppliers for each of them: that's 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 potential quotes, and our algorithm finds the ones with the best price and fastest delivery. And it works for even thousands of compounds. More on this soon...

3. 1-Click Application history (Lead Optimization)

We realized that 1-Click Docking and 1-Click Scaffold Hop are among your favorite tools. It is really easy to run these calculations and you get the results in a few seconds. However, in some cases it makes sense to see and compare multiple results and you might want to go back to one of your previous calculation. Now you can do that by clicking on the See history link at the top of 1-Click Docking and 1-Click Scaffold Hop.

NEW PRICING

We've got feedback that the previous pricing plans were too complicated, so we made them simple. We have put together three packages:

Basic

This is primarily meant for procurement managers and for those who frequently orders compounds and would like to optimize the costs (it contains Instant Quote). Plus, it is a great starter kit for modeling.

Advanced

This package offers a reasonable package for small-, and medium-sized companies and academic research groups containing all the major features with very reasonable limits that enables to run several projects in parallel.

Ultimate

This is an enterprise solution: full feature set with a practically infinitive computational capacity. To see the full comparison, check out the Pricing page.

We still offer the Free package for those who want to test out our system. It has to be mentioned that docking target upload is now only available for subscribed users, but you can still use what you have already uploaded. On the plus side, we provide some 1-Click Application history for the free users as well.

If you want, you can request a 7-day trial including all major features.

I hope you will find the new features and packages attractive. But if you need something customized, you can always tell us, you know that. Contact us, and we will try to find the best solution for you.

Cheers from:
The Mcule team