Life @ Westburg: Vincent de Maat

“If people just need an off-the-shelf product, there are plenty of places where they can find it,” he says. “Where we can add something is when we take the time to look further. What do you actually need to get your work done?”

A customer might be setting up an assay, planning a new laboratory, or running into a problem with an existing workflow. Vincent often hears questions along the lines of: we want to measure this; what do we need? Or: we are setting up a new lab, where do we start?

The catalogue is useful at that point, but it does not necessarily contain the complete answer.

“Every research question is different. Every objective is different,” says Vincent. “Sometimes the solution is quite simple, like supplying something differently. Sometimes you end up looking at a completely new product.”

There are practical limits. Plastics and laboratory equipment tend to leave less room for adjustment. Reagents and other liquid products can offer more flexibility, especially when manufacturers are willing to work directly with the customer and distributor.

Westburg is already doing this on several projects.

One public example is ETB-BISLIFE. When its existing Medium 199 was discontinued, Westburg worked with the customer and Capricorn Scientific on a custom replacement. In other projects, Vincent has seen relatively small changes to reagent quantities make an existing kit work better within an automated workflow.

Those projects often grow out of fairly ordinary customer relationships.

“You might initially supply an off-the-shelf product,” Vincent explains. “Over time you get to know what else they are doing. Then at some point they say: we have this problem. Then based on our knowledge and input of the customer, we find a solution ”

That makes the timing of the conversation important. A customer does not always arrive with a clearly defined custom project. Sometimes the issue only becomes visible after Westburg has been working with the lab for a while. The first order creates a starting point. The more useful questions come later, once there is enough context to understand the workflow and where it is falling short.

For Vincent, this is also where his own background becomes useful.

He studied molecular biomedicine and has worked in the lab himself. Today he also knows the commercial and distribution side of the business. That puts him in conversations with scientists, account managers, manufacturers and procurement teams, who may all be talking about the same project from a different angle.

“I know the laboratory side. I understand how people there think and what kinds of issues come up around a project. But I also know the distributor side,” he says.

Sometimes his role is simply making sure those people understand one another.

“You might have someone who is very specialised scientifically speaking to someone in procurement who doesn’t have that specific technical background. You have to translate the terminology both ways.”

Vincent calls himself “a bridge between two worlds”.

That bridge can also include the manufacturer. On more involved projects, the customer brings the application and the problem, Westburg helps work through the requirements, and the manufacturer contributes detailed product knowledge. Vincent describes that as bringing the three parties together around the same question: what needs to change for this to work properly in the customer’s setting?

It is a different kind of relationship from simply passing a request from customer to supplier. Vincent and colleagues can go into the technical details with the customer, involve the producer where needed, and work through possible adjustments together. The aim is to arrive at something that fits the actual workflow rather than forcing the workflow around an existing product.

It takes more time than supplying a standard product, and Vincent is clear that Westburg is still developing this way of working.

He also does not believe every customer needs that level of involvement.

Sometimes the right product already exists, and the best service is simply making it easy to buy. The opportunity comes when a laboratory has a question that does not fit neatly into a product search.

That is the part of the job Vincent expects to spend more time on.

“Ultimately, you want the customer to have what they really need,” he says. “Something that works for what they are trying to do, instead of something just good enough.”

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