Company Profile

Dave Perrett, Allessandro Beccaro and Iain RamsayALS is a leading supplier of laboratory and test instrumentation in Southern Africa. ALS provides testing solutions for manufacturing and research organisations in fields covering Metallurgy, Polymers, Coatings, Textiles, Food, Cosmetics, Mineralogy, Paper, Medical and Life Sciences to name but a few.

Our technical proficient sale team understands your requirements and provide cost-effective solutions to meet local and international standards. Application support plays a major role in ensuring that our customers maximise their laboratory investment through in-house workshops, application seminars and planned preventative maintenance schemes. After-sales support is of the highest standard in the industry and is backed by a motivated factory-trained technical support team.

Since inception in 1997, Advanced Laboratory Solutions has been solely owned by Dave Perrett, Alessandro Beccaro and Iain Ramsay. With the Broad-Based Black Empowerment Act of 2003 in mind, ALS has always ensured that they have met these criteria and have been audited annually. The result being an EmpowerDex Generic score of B-rating, Level Seven Contributor.

Social Outreach Programme

Advanced Laboratory Solutions as a distributor of highly technological and advanced laboratory and scientific equipment sees the need for a social outreach program as important to help stimulate and grow our future scientist and engineers. As we are dealing directly with educational institutions, our contribution has to have a direct impact on their future by exposing future scientists to new scientific investigation tools.

Some of the ways that we have helped contribute to the scientific community is sponsorship and educational workshops:

Microscopic Society of Southern Africa (MSSA) “Most up and coming Black Microscopist” Award

This annual award has been sponsored since 2005 to promote historically disadvantaged students and give them the opportunity to meet and network with international scientists. Professor Lang, MSSA Chairperson 2005 to 2006, believes this award comes at an important time in the history of MSSA, which is expanding its activities in the region. She said: “MSSA needs to grow by increasing our membership, particularly of young people and those who previously did not have the opportunity to become involved in science. I hope that this new award will inspire young people in the Southern Africa to follow a scientific career.”

This prize includes a full paid overseas trip to one of the international microscopy conferences to present their poster or paper. The selection criteria used for this award is the presentation of a scientific paper at the conference where content, presentation skills, and correctness of information presented are judged.

Sasol SciFest – making science count

Advanced Laboratory Solutions (ALS) has contributed in the promotion of science to learners. This scientific festival takes place in Grahamstown annually. ALS gave workshops to show how scientific tools can be used to investigate crime e.g. the use of scanning electron microscopes for gun shot residue (GSR) investigations.

Another talk based on the well-known BBC program “Grime Scene Investigations” showed the cleanliness in the home and how one can investigate which bacteria can cause illness.