Our laboratory and registration services help bring a product to market. This part of our practice does something different. It supports the organisations, agencies, associations and programmes that need research assembled, documents drafted, projects kept on schedule and results measured, without adding to their permanent staff.
Specialist judgement cannot be delegated. The work that surrounds it usually can be. The literature review before an assessment can begin, the evidence file a funder will want to see, the specification that has to be written before equipment can be bought sensibly, the minutes, the trackers, the translated annexes, the baseline figures nobody has had a free week to gather. That work is necessary, it is unglamorous, and it competes for the time of the very people who are hardest to replace.
Every assignment has a named owner in your organisation who sets the scope, approves the approach and accepts or rejects the result. We take direction. We do not give it.
Drafts, data and working material belong to you on delivery, without restriction. Our name appears only where you choose to put it, and nowhere else.
Most assignments are a defined deliverable at a fixed price. There is no retainer to sign before you have seen the quality of our work.
The services below suit any organisation that carries more technical work than it has hands to do it with, and that would rather buy a finished piece of work than a permanent post.
Regulatory authorities, inspection and quarantine services, food safety and public health programmes, and the intergovernmental bodies that coordinate them.
Trade bodies, producer groups and cooperatives that must produce credible technical material for members, regulators and buyers.
Companies that need research, procedures, specifications or training material prepared to a professional standard without diverting their technical staff.
Institutes, university groups and grant funded projects needing evidence assembly, proposal drafting, reporting and measurement support.
Each group is set out below with a plain description of every service and the specific thing you receive at the end of it. Use the search box to find a service by name, or open a group to read it in full.
Why clients start here. Research is the most portable of our services and the least intrusive. It can begin the week it is commissioned and it produces something you can use immediately, which makes it a straightforward way to judge the quality of our work before committing to anything larger.
We take one clearly defined question and search the published record for it: peer reviewed journals, official guidance, standards, technical reports and regulatory decisions. Every source is assessed for how much weight it can bear, so you are not left treating a conference abstract as though it were a controlled study.
You receive: a structured review with a full source register, a strength assessment for each source, and a plain language summary on the first page for readers who will not read the rest.
Where the same product or activity is governed differently in different places, we set the requirements beside one another so the differences are visible at a glance. Each requirement is cited to the instrument it comes from, so your team can verify any line without repeating the work.
You receive: a side by side comparison across the jurisdictions or standards you name, fully referenced.
You define the subjects you need to be warned about. We monitor them on a fixed schedule and report what has changed, with the source attached to every item so nothing arrives without provenance. This replaces the situation in which a development is noticed only when somebody happens to read the right article.
You receive: a scheduled bulletin against your own watch list, at whatever interval suits you.
A neutral survey of what equipment, materials or services actually exist for a given need, what each costs across its working life rather than at the moment of purchase, and what each option trades away. No brand is favoured and no supplier pays to appear.
You receive: an options survey with lifecycle costs and a clear statement of the trade offs.
Baseline figures, avoided loss reasoning and the data sources behind both, with every assumption stated openly rather than buried in a model. Written so that a finance reviewer can follow the arithmetic and, if they wish, disagree with it.
You receive: a documented evidence base with assumptions listed separately from findings.
You send us your own draft plan, specification or assessment before it is committed, and we look for the weak point while it is still inexpensive to fix. This is a deliberately adversarial service. Our value lies in what we find, not in agreeing with you.
You receive: written comment, organised by seriousness, distinguishing errors of fact from matters of judgement.
We convert an intention into a plan that can be followed: what has to be done, in what order, by when, dependent on what, and what could go wrong. Prepared in the format your team already uses, so nobody has to learn a new tool.
You receive: work breakdown, schedule, dependency map, milestone list and risk register.
The administrative weight of a committee is easy to underestimate. We prepare the agenda and briefing pack in advance, record the discussion accurately, log what was decided as distinct from what was discussed, and follow up on the items that have gone quiet since the last meeting.
You receive: agendas, briefing packs, minutes, decision logs and a maintained action tracker.
A clear statement of scope, roles, deliverables, timescale and acceptance criteria, drafted to your own template so it can go straight into your process. Most disputes later in a project trace back to a document like this being written too loosely.
You receive: drafts prepared for your amendment and approval.
When the same change has to happen in several places, the difficulty is rarely technical. It is keeping track of who is ready, who is not, and why. We maintain that picture and produce one consolidated report instead of several inconsistent ones.
You receive: sequencing plan, readiness checklists and a single consolidated status report.
Written while the detail is still fresh and structured so it remains usable after the people who lived through the project have moved on. A lessons register that nobody can navigate is the same as no lessons register.
You receive: after action documentation and a lessons register that survives staff turnover.
Why this matters more than it looks. Much of what an organisation knows sits in the heads of a small number of people and in files that only they can navigate. Converting that into a form which outlasts any individual is slow, unglamorous work with an unusually high return, and it is almost always the first thing postponed.
Standard operating procedures, technical manuals and field job aids drafted to your specification and, where possible, tested by the people who will actually use them. Written for use at the working position rather than at a desk, which usually means shorter, more visual and more specific than a policy document.
You receive: finished procedures, manuals and job aids in your own document format.
Controlled templates, version control, an evidence library and a records structure that an auditor can follow without a guide. This is the difference between having documents and having a documentation system.
You receive: a template set, a version control scheme and a records structure with a short guide to maintaining it.
Checklists, sampling forms, scoring guides and corrective action formats designed so that two different inspectors assessing the same site reach comparable conclusions. Consistency is a design property of the instrument, not a quality of the inspector.
You receive: a complete instrument set with scoring guidance and corrective action formats.
Parallel versions prepared side by side rather than translated afterwards, which avoids the drift that occurs when two language versions are revised separately. Any document intended for official use should be approved by your own language authority before release, and we prepare drafts on that basis.
You receive: matched English and Spanish drafts for your review and approval.
Field definitions, code lists, source inventories and quality rules. This is the groundwork that decides whether two datasets can ever be compared, and it is invisible until the moment somebody tries to merge them and cannot.
You receive: a documented data dictionary with code lists and quality rules.
A written statement of the operational requirement, agreed with the technical owner before any product or supplier is discussed. Taking this step first is what prevents a specification from being quietly written around a product somebody has already seen.
You receive: an agreed requirement statement.
A specification written around what the item must achieve rather than around any brand or model, so that competing offers can be compared on equal terms and so that a better solution is not excluded by accident.
You receive: a brand neutral performance specification ready for your procurement process.
A survey of what is genuinely available, with lifecycle cost, serviceability, spare part availability and support arrangements set out for each option. The cheapest item to buy is frequently the most expensive to own, and a scan is where that becomes visible.
You receive: an options survey with lifecycle cost and support analysis.
Documented checks on capability, references and certifications, and where useful a physical facility inspection with a written report. Particularly valuable when a supplier is in a country you cannot easily visit.
You receive: a verification report and, where commissioned, a detailed facility inspection report.
A comparison matrix built against criteria you set, with our reasoning shown rather than concealed, so that your evaluation panel can challenge any judgement we have made. The recommendation remains yours in every case.
You receive: a completed comparison matrix with reasoning attached.
Acceptance test protocols and commissioning documentation, so that what arrives can be demonstrated to be what was specified before the final payment is released.
You receive: acceptance test protocols and commissioning records.
Our procurement boundary. We do not select suppliers, hold supplier relationships on a client's behalf, or accept any commission, discount, referral fee or other benefit from any supplier connected to work we advise on. We do not bid for contracts we helped to specify. Any prior or current relationship with a company appearing in a market scan is disclosed in writing before the work begins. If you prefer, specification and sourcing can be assigned to entirely separate parties and we will support that arrangement.
A competency map measured against the tasks people actually perform rather than the tasks named in their job description, followed by an honest gap analysis. This frequently shows that the training being requested is not the training that is needed.
You receive: a competency map and a prioritised gap analysis.
Session plans, slides, handouts, case studies and assessment items, pitched at the working level of the actual audience. Material written for a specialist and delivered to a field technician teaches very little.
You receive: a complete, ready to deliver training package.
Facilitator guides, delivery notes and assessment tools so that your own people can run the training thereafter. The purpose is to remove the need for us, not to create a recurring dependency.
You receive: facilitator guides and assessment tools for internal delivery.
Scenario design, observation instruments and after action templates, so that a plan is tested under controlled conditions rather than first tested by a real event. The value of a drill lies almost entirely in how honestly it is observed.
You receive: scenario pack, observer instruments and after action report template.
Plain language guidance for the people at the end of the chain, written to be understood on first reading without a technical background. Prepared in English or Spanish, or both in parallel.
You receive: print and digital ready guidance material.
Handling, exposure control, protective equipment, storage, disposal and record keeping guidance for work involving regulated or hazardous materials, written for the person doing the task. Documentation only. We do not handle, transport or supply regulated materials.
You receive: safety and stewardship procedures, forms and a supporting training outline.
Two things stated in advance. Our fee is for research and drafting and does not vary with the outcome of any application. We make no claim to influence with any funder, and we do not represent ourselves to a funder as speaking for a client.
A mapped landscape of the funding mechanisms your organisation is actually eligible for, with criteria, application cycles, funding ceilings and examples of what each has funded before. Precedent awards are usually the most informative part.
You receive: a mapped and referenced funding landscape.
Drafts written to the funder's own template and answering the questions the funder actually asks, with a logic model, work plan and budget structure that hold together. Prepared for your team to revise, approve and submit in your own name.
You receive: complete drafts in the funder's format.
The supporting evidence a reviewer will look for, assembled and referenced so it can be attached rather than assembled under deadline pressure. Most weak applications are not badly argued; they are unevidenced.
You receive: an indexed evidence annex.
Draft progress and completion reports prepared against the funder's stated requirements and deadlines, in the format they specify, for your review and signature.
You receive: draft reports ready for your approval.
A short set of indicators that can genuinely be collected with the staff and systems you have, each with a written definition and collection method. A long list of indicators nobody collects is worse than a short list somebody does.
You receive: a baseline record and a defined indicator set with collection methods.
Specifications and working prototypes built on validated extracts of data you supply, designed around the decisions the dashboard is meant to support. We specify and prototype; we do not build or host production systems.
You receive: a reporting specification and a working prototype.
Short, decision oriented briefs with the recommendation on the first page and the supporting detail behind it, written on the assumption that the reader has four minutes rather than forty.
You receive: briefs in a consistent house format.
Draft advisories, notices, explanatory material and responses to recurring questions, prepared for your review and released under your name. Accuracy and plain language matter more here than anywhere else.
You receive: draft communication material for approval.
A written record of what was avoided, retained or improved, with the evidence attached, captured as it happens rather than reconstructed years later. Much of the value of technical work lies in things that did not happen, which is precisely why it goes unrecorded and unfunded.
You receive: an evidenced benefit record you can use in budget and funding discussions.
No service matches that search.
Try a broader word, or clear the box to see all thirty seven services. If what you need is not listed, tell us what it is and we will say honestly whether we are the right people for it.
A description of services that lists only inclusions is incomplete. These boundaries are firm, and knowing them in advance saves everybody time.
Four steps, each small enough to stop. Each one is a decision point and any of them may be the last, at no penalty.
Sixty to ninety minutes, at no cost and with no obligation. Our purpose is to listen: what is consuming your team's time, what has been postponed for want of hands, and what we would need to understand before we could be useful. We send you our notes afterwards for correction.
A single task at a fixed price agreed in advance, delivered in four to six weeks. It should be genuinely useful if it succeeds and easily discarded if it does not, so that you can judge our quality on real work rather than on a brochure.
Only if the first piece earned it. A written scope, named deliverables, acceptance criteria, a schedule, an agreed price and a named owner on your side. Time limited, ending with a proper handover.
The only arrangement in which we ask for continuity, and we ask for it only when the earlier steps have clearly justified it. A modest agreed volume of support each month, drawn on when needed, reviewed quarterly and terminable at short notice.
This channel covers advisory and programme support. Our product focused regulatory, laboratory and registration services are described separately.
Product development, toxicology, chemistry, efficacy and analytical testing, food and nutrition testing, registration support, technical documentation and study placement.
View our services ›Who we are, where we work, and the principles of fairness, integrity and transparency that govern how we price and deliver every engagement.
About us ›Tell us what you are trying to do. If we are not the right people for it we will say so, and where we can we will suggest who is.
Get in touch ›The first discussion costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If there is something useful we can do, we will propose one small piece of work so you can judge the result before considering anything larger.
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