Never fear about your former employers...

(Takes off shoe and bangs it on the podium) WE WILL BURY THEM!

as a former employee...yes, they are in a mess to put it nicely.

Eton Bio works the best! I have had no problems. Try them out. www.etonbio.com

Definitely agree. Eurofins operations, not only EMO, in the US are a mess.

For modified oligos Sigma is worth a try, we had no issues with quality or time.

gene wiz

Who are the local sequencing companies (other than Agencourt) in Boston?

We are current Seqwright customers also and looking to switch. I have got a couple trial offers from a company called Dewalch and I am thinking about trying them out, free trial is free.

What other companies should we try?

Depends where you are. Most of the big biotech areas (Boston, NIH region, Southern Cal, Bay Area) have good companies that do free pick-up in the afternoon and run their machines overnight. Having free pick-up and 12-18 hour turn around changes how you work--you no longer hassle about Fed-Ex for 1 or 2 samples. I use GeneWiz in San Diego, but wouldn't Fed-Ex to them if I was in the Bay Area.

like a cheap hooker!

IDT is fast

We are current Seqwright customers also and looking to switch. I have got a couple trial offers from a company called Dewalch and I am thinking about trying them out, free trial is free.

What other companies should we try?

Sure! Just last week they rotated their management again. A whole new set of excuses just got sent to the tech support group.

Well who will get let go this week? Is there anyone left to blame?

Touched a nerve! And looks like it was someone tall enough to reach the keyboard - barely.

A company that's willing to sue their best customers is really out of control. EMO must really be in the hands of mental midgets these days.

It should be a real warning to anyone thinking of doing business with either Operon or with Eurofins in general.

By doing this, they're also handing an incredible opportunity to the competitor's sales forces to scare existing and potential customers into steering clear of Operon.

I also can't believe that management would risk trashing Eurofin's reputation by letting this sort of thinking get out into the market.

I wonder if the Band EMO can sue for trademark infringement? ;-)

geez, what a crappy name...no wonder they're going out of business. I thought this was EMO: http://www.fourfa.com/

Eurofins MWG Operon

The unwieldy new name for the new company formerly known as Operon Biotechnologies formerly known as QIAGEN Operon formerly known as Operon a QIAGEN Company formerly known as Operon Technologies.

What's EMO?

For the last several years the management focused on securing exclusive accounts with companies like Qiagen, DNA20, Thermo Fisher, etc. The deal is that they only buy their oligos from Operon or use EMO oligos in their distributor business in exchange for certain performance standards.

EMO did not consistently meet those standards and so the companies walked apparently with the exception of Thermo Fisher where EMO severed the relationship. Check out the Hot Chocolate memo for more info.

Now EMO is threatening to sue them for breach of agreement. How they think this will result in getting the business back is beyond me. Maybe they're only looking to recover their losses.

So who is Operon going to sue? Can you sue customers for not buying from you, that seems risky.

watch management try to get a clue while production limps and everyone else runs for thier life.

there aren't any more employees left to do the job

Wow. Someone's got their excuses all lined up. Probably on note cards too.

Well that completely explains everything!

It completely unfair to blame production for the problems at Operon. There were some problems after the integration a year ago, but all the production problems were fixed many months ago and our TAT is as good as any oligo company around.

It's not production's fault if customers can't read their own contracts and figure out how to properly calculate turnaround time. We've been delivering product on-time even if customers can't figure that out and we're going to be able to prove that in court soon. Customers have to follow their contracts and can't just change how they decide to calculate on-time delivery.

And its wrong to blame production for costs being too high when no one will force the sales people to price product right. If sales just won't work hard enough to make the customer understand that quality doesn't come for free then how can production be blamed for that?

Operon produces the highest quality oligos of any company out there and our on-time delivery is at least as good as anyone out there. But if you just give the product away and promise all kinds of things that not even IDT could do, then no customer is going to be happy with that, but no one should be blaming production problems for any of that.

6-9 cents/base for plates, 10-14 cents/base for singles are pretty much what you can get from IDT, Sigma, or IVGN

What is the current market rate for PCR quality oligos? Last I heard for plate based products was $0.075/base. Has it gone lower?

>>> Well, to be fair to AB if his actual cost to produce the product is more than the competition is charging what really can be done?

The answer would have been to fix production (which is AB's supposed job) not to raise prices (which AB did even though that NOT his job)!

>>> Well, to be fair to AB if his actual cost to produce the product is more than the competition is charging what really can be done?

The answer would have been to FIX PRODUCTION (which is AB's supposed job) not raise prices (which AB did even though that NOT his job)!

Well, to be fair to AB if his actual cost to produce the product is more than the competition is charging what really can be done?

Sadly this comes from the attitude that the customer is stupid, the customer needs to be forced to "pay what it's worth" based on AB's idea of how much it costs to produce without ever considering what our competitors are charging and that customers need to "have their expectations set" to accept whatever crap we choose to ship whenever we decide to ship it.

It's proven to be really hard to sell customers on the advantages of Eurofins when we're the low quality, high priced, slow delivery option. In the end the customers all vote with their feet!

We didn't get this way by accident, its taken a lot of hard work at ignoring the right things to do to get us where we are today!

Pissed off, yes. "a LOT"...well, I don't think we can say that anymore.

The IDT Reps are having a field day on the west coast flipping the remaining Operon accounts over to IDT. Operon seems to have a LOT of pissed-off customers out here!

We've been very happy with Genewiz since leaving MWG recently. Better product, faster delivery, superior service, far less hassle.

We switched from Seqwright to Mwg-Operon last year. They were no better than Seqwright except they got our invoices wrong more often. We switch to Eton 6-months ago and have been very happy.

This was exactly our experience with OperonMwg sequencing. We switched to Macrogen six months ago. They're very inexpensive and have better quality and response times than Operon.

If you are in one of GeneWiz's pick-up zones in San Diego, I highly recommend them. For commercial customers, pricing is better than Eton and turn around time is usually about 8-10 hours from pick-up to data being downloadable. They work nightshift in San Diego, with sequencers getting loaded in the evening and data posted around 2 am.

If you are using their standard primers, it is real simple--miniprep DNA in a PCR strip or plate.

Does anyone know if Eurofins is looing big customers other than QIAGEN?

Yea...lots! Why do you think they dont' say anything on their website about DNA 2.0 anymore.

Someone asked about other researcher's experiences with Operon's sequencing services. I'll try to describe our unfortunate experiences and offer some recommendations.

Operon's sequencing lab was acquired when they bought MWG about a year ago. Our lab used MWG and Operon for sequencing for about 3 years before leaving them for Eton a few months ago.

Until last spring, their sequencing services were the best in the industry. Everything turned around in a day, they were almost always able to sequencing anything we sent in and they got really long reads even with difficult templates and their technical service was always very knowledgeable and responsive.

Starting early last summer they just seemed to come apart. Their explanation to us was they had a few problems when relocating their lab to Alabama after Operon bought them. For us, the problem was that they never bounced back, they just kept getting worse and worse until we finally dropped them late last year.

Here's a rundown of what our experience was at the time we dropped them:

It regularly took a week or more to get data, close to 1/3 of all our samples were screwed up (no data after using up all our template or they would send us other peoples data, that sort of thing), their read-lengths were 400-500 bases (1/2 of what we were used to in the past from them) and their technical support had gone from great to just being ugly and nasty with us. To make things worse, they'd screw up as many as 1/2 our invoices in a month.

They kept promising improvements and we even had the head of sales and marketing visit us. He promised all kind of changes but things just kept getting worse every month.

After talking to colleagues at the institute, we went with Eton (they're in San Diego) and have been pleased. They're not perfect, but they're usually very responsive when a problem arises. This is in stark contrast with how we were treated at Operon.

To summarize what we learned from talking with colleagues is that Operon, Seqwrite and Macrogen are at them bottom of barrel, Eton and Genwiz are usually very good and Agencourt and Cogenics are somewhere between these two extremes.

We're currently fairly pleased with Eton, but haven't used them for long. If we decide to switch from Eton we'll try Genwiz next (lots of colleagues had really good things to say about them)

Its unfortunate what's happened to MWG, they used to offer really great service. We did a lot of business with them for a long time, but it's really sad to see how they just fell apart after getting bought out.

Was that supposed to read "wooing" or "loosing" ?

Does anyone know if Eurofins is looing big customers other than QIAGEN?

Does Operon do sequencing? We're not happy with SeqWright and are looking for a new service. Anyone have experiences with Operon sequencing?

Be glad you're just ordering oligos, at least you finally got something you could use. Our experience with their sequencing services was a total disaster. Even SeqWrong is better than these clowns.

probably cause management is clueless about how to actually run a manufacuring site and the people actualy doing the work don't know a thing about how to do their jobs

Eurofins was fine when I ordered last week

yeah, just call Operon, you'll get a human to talk with, not some Bangalore call center temp.

You actually got through to their CS dept? Hell...every time I call I get routed to voice mail being assured that they will get back to me. Never have. Bah.

Last week, there were a huge service order for repairing all the clocks in their mfg labs. All PCs reverted back to the year 1900 and their hourglasses ran out of sand.

I got my pcr primers to a half-dozen loci from them fine last week. Nothing special, just detection primers, but they arrived in a few days, no hassles.