Your six-step guide to making the business case for modernising biological storage solutions.

Research leads evaluating automated storage systems face a common challenge: justifying significant capital expenditure when manual freezer costs already sit within operational budgets. Many organisations discover their true storage costs only when preparing business cases, revealing expenses previously hidden across multiple budget lines.

We understand. At UK Biocentre we look after up to 35 million biological samples representing large-scale studies into health and disease like Our Future Health, commercial research projects, significant biological collections and academic programmes. Over the years, we have helped countless clients work up a business case that provides the stability in storage that they need, within a budget that works for them.

This guide presents a six-step approach to building a compelling business case for storage modernisation, drawing on Dr Cox's analysis and UK Biocentre's operational experience.

Step one: Quantify your baseline manual storage costs

A -80°C freezer's £10,000 purchase price represents just the beginning of its true cost. Each unit capable of storing 30,000 to 40,000 samples consumes approximately 7,000kWh annually, translating to between £2,000 and £5,000 in electricity costs at current UK rates. For an organisation operating 15 freezers, annual energy expenditure alone reaches £30,000 to £75,000.

Start by mapping your complete freezer inventory. Document each unit's age, purchase price, and capacity. Project replacement cycles to understand recurring capital demands over your planning horizon. Track maintenance contracts, filter replacements, and historical breakdown frequencies to establish realistic annual provisions for ongoing costs.

Dr Cox emphasises that direct costs tell only part of the story. When explaining the hidden overheads of -80°C freezers, he describes how they function: "They're essentially big heat exchanges. To get that much cold in the middle, you have to produce a lot of heat on the outside, and that heat is dumped directly into your building's ventilation system, so there's the hidden cost of also removing that heat from the environment produced by those freezers."

Work with facilities teams to quantify HVAC capacity allocated to heat removal from freezer operations. This infrastructure overhead rarely appears in storage budget calculations but represents genuine expense that your organisation incurs.

Space costs matter particularly for organisations with limited laboratory real estate. Dr Cox describes a common scenario: "-80°C freezers often find their way into all sorts of unusual places and probably all been to places where -80°Cs are lining corridors , where we effectively have corridor biobanks, because they cannot occupy more space in the laboratories themselves."

Calculate square footage occupied by freezers, including these corridor installations. Apply your facility's cost allocation methodology to establish the true space cost. Include access clearance requirements and ventilation considerations in your assessment.

Staff time represents perhaps the largest hidden expense. Dr Cox explains: "Managing manual freezers is quite time intensive. Even if you have a very good and accurate inventory, the act of having to go into the freezers and hunt for samples is a big spend of time. You really want scientists to be working at the bench and being innovative and discovering new things rather than maintaining inventories and fishing around in freezers trying to find samples."

Conduct time studies across representative periods to measure hours spent on inventory management, sample retrieval, and access coordination activities. Apply appropriate hourly rates including oncosts to establish total personnel costs attributable to manual storage management.

Document sample loss incidents, temperature excursion events, and inventory discrepancies. Calculate the investment required to collect, process, and store samples in your typical studies to understand what poor storage conditions risk compromising.

Step two: Understand automated storage capabilities

Automated storage systems operate fundamentally differently from manual freezers, creating benefits that extend beyond simple cost reduction. UK Biocentre's automated systems demonstrate these operational advantages. Dr Cox notes they "can pick tens of thousands of samples out of automated storage each day because the stores operate not only during the day, but also during the night."

Temperature stability represents a critical quality advantage. Dr Cox explains: "Automated stores really offer fantastic temperature homogeneity. Any thermal movements from samples are minimised and freeze-thaw cycles are particularly eliminated. So in terms of long-term storage conditions, the large automated stores are absolutely the best option."

This matters because poor storage conditions compromise sample quality. Inadequate temperature management means the quality of those samples will suffer, particularly RNA and proteins, cells become less viable and generally make samples less valuable for ongoing research and diagnostics.

The operational flexibility automated systems enable can transform research capabilities. Dr Cox provides a specific example: "We had a customer recently who wanted to conduct some genotyping experiments. They wanted randomised samples put into plates, but they wanted certain plates to be left blank for control and for a random sample on that plate to be duplicated into another position for internal control use for a replication study."

He explains how automation solved this complex requirement: "One of the nice things about having automated storage is that can be quickly and easily implemented for something which would be very slow, very labour intensive and quite error prone if you were having to do that manually."

Energy efficiency provides measurable environmental benefits. Dr Cox states that automated storage demonstrates much lower energy consumption per sample compared to manual alternatives, making automated systems “much more environmentally sustainable solutions than carpeting corridors with -80°C freezers.”

For organisations operating under regulatory oversight, automated systems improve compliance. Dr Cox addresses organisations with Human Tissue Authority licensing: "If you are going to store those materials, then you really need to think hard and commit to putting in place a system which is going to manage them effectively. Automated storage just because it's more accurate, the conditions are more rigorous, will necessarily store those samples in a way which is much more conducive to the approval of the HTA."

Step three: obtain detailed automation costs and specifications

Engage potential automation vendors to obtain quotations based on your specific capacity requirements. Ask for information covering system capacity and scalability, specifying current storage needs and projected growth over your planning horizon. Automated systems typically offer modular expansion capabilities that manual storage cannot match.

Assess compatibility with existing LIMS platforms, workflow management systems, and facility infrastructure. Integration costs vary substantially based on current system architecture. Include site preparation requirements, electrical infrastructure upgrades, and staff training programmes in your cost assessment.

Evaluate your existing collection's tube formats carefully. Automated systems require specific tube types with appropriate barcoding. Dr Cox emphasises considering this early: "As soon as you start thinking about samples, think about storage. Something as mundane as the tube that those samples will end up in is important. If you can identify a tube which is automation friendly, processing friendly, and information friendly, you could save yourself a huge amount of money. If you use the right sort of tubes, then they will fit into high density storage and be able to be stored with the ultimate in cost and energy efficiency."

For organisations with existing collections in varied formats, reformatting represents a significant one-time cost. However, this process often reveals value beyond automation enablement. The inventory verification identifies lost samples, corrects database inaccuracies, and provides confidence in collection integrity that manual systems rarely deliver.

Step four: Calculate your return on investment

Structure your ROI analysis to compare total implementation costs against operational savings across all identified categories. Your analysis should cover a timeframe matching typical equipment lifecycles, generally seven to ten years.

Calculate avoided capital expenditure by modelling your collection's growth trajectory. Manual storage expansion requires purchasing additional freezers every few years as collections grow. Account for these avoided purchases in your ROI calculation. Include avoided infrastructure costs if your facility faces space constraints requiring building expansion or additional leases.

Compare energy consumption between your current manual configuration and proposed automated capacity. Apply your organisation's energy rates to the 7,000kWh annual consumption per freezer. For organisations operating numerous freezers, these savings compound substantially. Factor in the HVAC cost reductions from eliminating freezer heat loads.

Quantify staff time savings by estimating how automation changes storage-related activities. Use your baseline time studies to project reductions in inventory management, sample retrieval, and coordination activities. Apply the same hourly rates used in baseline calculations to establish the value of redirecting personnel towards research activities.

Document specific research workflows that would benefit from rapid, precise sample retrieval in complex configurations. Whilst these capabilities resist direct financial quantification, they represent genuine operational value that stakeholders should understand when evaluating the proposal.

Step five: Address colleagues’ priorities

Different internal stakeholders evaluate automation proposals through different lenses. Structure your business case to address each group's specific concerns whilst maintaining a cohesive overall narrative.

• Finance directors focus on capital requirements and cash flow implications. Present your comprehensive baseline cost analysis alongside automation costs to demonstrate total cost of ownership rather than simple capital expenditure. Emphasise predictable ongoing costs compared to manual storage's variable expenses from breakdowns and emergency repairs. Highlight avoided capital expenditure in future years as collections grow.

• Operations managers prioritise reliability and disaster recovery capabilities. Detail the backup systems and redundancy built into automated platforms compared to manual storage's vulnerability to individual freezer failures. Provide vendor references from comparable organisations and request site visits to operational installations where possible.

• Research directors value sample integrity and research capability enhancement. Reference the temperature stability advantages and elimination of freeze-thaw cycles. For organisations conducting regulatory studies or banking samples for long-term research programmes, these quality advantages may outweigh pure financial considerations. Present concrete examples of complex sample handling that automation enables.

• Sustainability officers examine environmental impact and institutional commitment alignment. Calculate energy consumption reductions and carbon footprint improvements. Many institutions have formal sustainability commitments requiring carbon reduction across operations. Position automation as contributing to these institutional objectives whilst simultaneously delivering operational benefits.

Step six: structure your proposal and implementation plan

Structure your business case document to guide readers efficiently through your analysis. Begin with an executive summary presenting the core recommendation, total investment required, and headline benefits. State the payback period and key operational improvements concisely. Many decision makers read only this section, so ensure it contains sufficient information for preliminary approval decisions.

Document your current state analysis comprehensively, including existing storage infrastructure, capacity utilisation, and operational costs across all identified categories. Include inventory of current freezer assets, their ages, and projected replacement schedules. This section establishes the baseline against which automation benefits are measured.

Specify the recommended automated system with sufficient technical detail to demonstrate thorough evaluation. Include capacity specifications, growth provisions, and integration requirements. Attach vendor quotations as appendices to substantiate cost estimates.

Present all financial calculations with transparent assumptions and methodologies. Structure this section for financial stakeholder review, using familiar formats and terminology. Include sensitivity analyses showing how results vary with different assumptions about energy costs or collection growth rates.

Acknowledge implementation risks and mitigation strategies. Address concerns about system reliability, vendor support capabilities, and transition disruption. Demonstrate you have considered potential problems and developed appropriate responses.

Provide a detailed timeline with clear milestones and resource requirements. Allow adequate time for vendor selection, specification development, procurement processes, site surveys, and internal approvals. System installation timeframes vary based on site preparation complexity. Plan for LIMS integration, workflow development, and staff training programmes.

Consider parallel operations during transition periods. Samples cannot transfer instantaneously from manual to automated storage. Most organisations maintain manual systems operational during initial automation deployment, creating temporary dual costs that should appear in your business case. For organisations with existing collections, estimate migration timelines based on current collection size and available resources.

Close with clear recommendations and proposed next steps. If seeking approval for full investment, state this explicitly. If requesting approval for feasibility study or pilot implementation, structure the request appropriately.

When automation for biological sample storage makes sense

Dr Cox identifies a practical decision threshold based on UK Biocentre's operational experience: The threshold typically lies around 10,000 to 20,000 samples with regular access requirements. Below this scale, the capital investment in automation becomes harder to justify. Above it, the operational benefits and long-term cost savings make automation increasingly attractive.

He notes that hybrid approaches work for many organisations: Active research collections with daily access needs might remain in manual freezers for convenience, whilst archived samples from completed studies transfer to automated storage. This hybrid strategy balances accessibility with long-term cost-effectiveness.

Dr Cox frames the fundamental question as one of resource allocation: "When researchers spend hours maintaining freezer inventories, hunting for mislabelled samples, or coordinating access among multiple users, they're not advancing science. When research budgets support freezer purchases instead of instrumentation, the opportunity cost extends beyond immediate financial considerations."

Building compelling business cases for automated storage requires comprehensive cost analysis, realistic implementation planning, and clear presentation of both financial and operational benefits. Success depends on thorough baseline cost quantification, early stakeholder engagement, and proposals structured to address each decision maker's priorities. The business case becomes stronger as collection size increases and access requirements grow, but organisations must evaluate their specific circumstances to determine optimal storage approaches for their research programmes.