Happy Thursday evening everybody! Let's talk about dental efficiency. As I'm traveling across the country visiting close 100 different offices, dental efficiency has become one of the hottest topics, especially for my clients at ZenSupplies. So when we talk about dental inventory systems, ordering, ordering dental supplies, or anything involving dental supplies, efficiency is one of the biggest things.
Let's break it down and look into what I mean by efficiency. For example, if you look at the savings on dental supplies there are usually two components that come into the savings. One is how much you actually save on the products. For example, instead of buying Lidocaine for $27 or $30 a box, you can buy Lidocaine for $23 a box. But the second part, which is the most important part about dental efficiency, is are you buying three boxes of Lidocaine when you only need to buy two boxes of Lidocaine? That's a big component and that's how I spend the majority of my time with some of my clients across the country talking about efficiencies.
Let's break it down into even greater detail. What do I mean by efficiency when it comes to how do you know how many boxes of a certain product that you need to buy? For example, I'm a big proponent of TipOut bins; you can look it up on simplastics.com. Our product at ZenSupplies works very well with organizing your supplies and organizing your dental inventory with TipOut bins. By that, I mean that in order to have the whole system set up and ready to go, you first start with organizing and centralizing supplies, leaving no supplies inside the treatment room and no hidden elements like drawers or cabinets. You might keep some supplies in the treatment room, just a little bit, to have something in the room in case something happens, but the majority of the supplies are located in one central location. For example, that's going to be in sterilization.
Now, in sterilization you are going to remove the doors. If it's an existing office, you will remove the doors from the upper cabinet so you can actually see what you have and then you can install shelving and tip-up bins so that you can actually put the product on the shelves and have TipOut bins to display the products so we can easily see them.
The second part is that you are going to be buying dental supplies every two weeks. The reason we like every two weeks is because you have a great mix or combination of being able to get a benefit of free shipping (if you have enough products to buy) and at the same time you're not storing too many products.
The next component is, when you look when you need to buy dental supplies, you're not going after free goods. Free goods are dangerous. If there's a special for buy three get one for free, which is really enticing, and you only need two boxes of something, you are going to buy two. You are going to bypass three and get one for free. Meaning, if the composite from GC is buy three get one for free and you only need two boxes, that means you are only going to buy two boxes. That way, you purchase what you need, your inventory system is going to control what you need, and then you're not buying anything extra.
So with that being said, the number one step to efficiency is no supplies in the treatment room. Number two, everything is stored in one central location, a sterilization room or some storage room. You have no doors on the upper cabinets, you have shelves to easily display the product to put in the boxes, and you have TipOut bins. Then, you have some sort of system within your office with your assistants, that every single order needs to be approved by you and you need to look at the schedule ahead of time. For example, in the next two weeks, do you really need three boxes of Lidocaine or can you be fine just with two? Only then does the order go to the distributor.
So that is what we call an efficient inventory management system. That means it's organized, it’s all in one place, you look at it before it's being submitted to the distributor, and it has the right quantities. If you implement those steps, just the stuff that I mentioned, you are probably going to cut down your dental supply budget from 6%, 7%, or 8% to 5%.
On the next post, we are going to talk about how to get from 5% to 4%. Good luck!
[Edited by Matt Fischer]
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