What We Aim To Do
Our goal is to support research labs by giving them more time to focus on their work. We streamline the chemical receiving process by reducing the time labs spend tracking packages, updating inventory, and disposing of packaging materials. By handling these administrative tasks, we ease the burden on researchers while also improving inventory accuracy—a win for everyone!
Chemical Receiving in Select Buildings
ChemCentral currently handles chemical receiving for three of our building locations. The locations we do receiving for are listed as follows:
- Joan and Sanford I. Weill Neurosciences Building located at Mission Bay
- Pride Hall located near Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (ZSFG)
- Byers Hall and Genentech Hall located at Mission Bay
Both our Weill and Pride Hall site have one physical location that serves as both the Stockroom and Receiving location. Byers and Genentech Hall will have separate rooms for both services.
Parnassus will be the next location we aim to expand our receiving services too!
How Our Process Works
A ChemCentral account must be made prior so that we can receive your chemicals and add them to your lab's inventory.
If you are located at one of the select locations that have ChemCentral and chemical receiving available to them, then here is a quick run down of how our process works.
1. Chemicals that are bought through BearBuy (with a commodity code deeming a hazardous chemical) will have the ship-to address automatically changed and rerouted to our ChemCentral address and room during the checkout process.
- 2540 23rd Street, Room 2551 for Pride Hall
- 1651 4th Street, Room 167 for the Weill Building
- 600 16th Street, Room N101 for Byers and Genentech Hall
2. Orders will be delivered to the appropriate ChemCentral location. Once we receive it at ChemCentral, we unpack and inventory the items immediately into our ChemCentral Receiving Inventory. We dispose of any excess packaging materials and keep all important documents with the package.
3. After inventorying the item, we email the individual listed on the package's 'Attention-to' line. For Pride Hall and Genentech Hall, we notify them that their package is ready for pick-up at ChemCentral Receiving. For the Weill building, we deliver the items to the lab's designated drop zone. We attach a picture of the items onto the email. After the items are picked up, the researcher will need to accept our Transfer Request under "Pending Transfers" on Chemicals. See location specific pages on our website for more details.
Important Details
Packages will still be delivered to us through either UCSF Logistics or any of the other various couriers, e.g. FedEx or UPS. Our receiving process has no effect on the couriers delivery times. We do not have control of when they will deliver packages to us but once we do receive them, we immediately start our process and let researchers know as soon as possible when it is ready to be picked up during normal store hours.
Temperature Sensitive Packages
Our process stays mostly the same when handling temperature sensitive packages. This includes packages that come with dry ice or ice packs, and packages that are shipped ambient but the storage condition should be either refrigerated or put in a freezer. ChemCentral does not have any refrigerated or freezer storage in our spaces. When dealing with these packages, we send out our emails as "High Importance" and will also CC the Principal Investigator for the lab the package belongs to. We do not remove any of the important packaging it comes with like the Styrofoam container or the dry ice / ice packs.
If there is someone in your lab that you would like us to include in all emails regarding picking up packages, please feel free to contact us and we will add it to our records.
