Free calculator
How long is your R&D Easter egg hunt?
Estimate the time your team spends looking for past results, and what it costs when an experiment gets run again because nobody could find or trust the first one.
Two minutesNo sign-upRuns in your browser
The cost of how things work today
per year, combining lost capacity and repeated experiments
Search time is shown as lost capacity. Salaried hours are already paid for, so the cost is the work your team could have done instead.
Check your numbers with a reconstruction test
Pick one decision your team made in the last two years, such as a raw material approval. Ask someone who wasn't involved to rebuild the evidence behind it: formulations, lots, conditions and results, including the trials that failed. Count the systems they open and the people they ask. The place where the trail breaks is where to start.
How this is calculated
- Hours spent searching per year:
scientists × search hours per week × working weeks - Lost capacity in full-time scientists:
scientists × search hours per week ÷ working hours per week - Time cost of searching:
hours spent searching per year × cost per hour - Cost of repeated experiments:
experiments repeated per year × cost per repeat - Total:
time cost of searching + cost of repeated experiments
Search hours and rerun hours are counted separately. A failed search that ends in a rerun appears once in each, because they are different hours. Everything runs in your browser and nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.
