OTOH as a Civil Servant in the 70s & 80s we humble lab rats had charge of the day-to-day ordering of supplies. Just write out the order in NCR book and get the office to send it out. Amongst other thing I found a cut-price supplier for methylumbelliferyl phosphate, one of our common reagents, and discovered that discounted blood-in-urine test sticks were a good and more convenient scene test for blood than the three reagent test we handed out to SOCOs in place of the previous test involving a carcinogenic dye*. If you give the people at the coal face the chance to make purchasing decisions within a reasonable budget you'll find they can save money.
* I wasn't pleased to discover years later that lab where my daughter was doing her PhD were using the same reagent as a labelling agent for an immunological marker.
