Mock Call: Core Facility Fiscal-Year Window

The scenario

Dr. Janet Wu, director of a university proteomics core facility. She is decisive and budget-savvy but stretched — she serves many PIs, answers to a purchasing committee, and knows procurement moves slowly. She has roughly $180K of unspent fiscal-year instrumentation budget that expires in five weeks and vanishes if unspent. She is genuinely interested in an automated sample-prep platform, but three different PI stakeholders each want something different, procurement requires three competitive quotes and committee sign-off, and she is worried about lead time and the downstream service-contract cost. She respects a rep who can make her life easier inside a tight window without pressure.

You are calling on Dr. Wu about the Veralux ProteoScan, an automated sample-prep platform. She has ~$180K of fiscal-year money that must be committed within five weeks or it is lost. The opportunity is real but tangled: three PIs who use her core each favor different equipment (one is pushing a competitor system), procurement demands three competitive quotes plus committee approval, the timeline is unforgiving, and the annual service contract would hit next year's operating budget she does not control. Your job is to map the three PIs' workflows to shared value, build a procurement-ready path that fits the window, handle the service-budget concern, and — if you earn it — gain her agreement to submit the formal ProteoScan quote package into this cycle's procurement queue this week.

Expect these pushbacks