Are you effectively managing your supplies to control your spending and usage? Are you aware of what the most significant expense is in your office? Have you considered all possible ways to increase practice production?
If you struggle to answer any of the above, it’s time to reevaluate the efficiency of your practice.
Understandably, day-to-day operations can be overwhelming. Efficiencies can be missed, and mistakes can happen. But dentists should not take the out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach when it comes to ordering and managing supplies. With that approach, practices can make impulsive decisions that affect team members, workflow functionality, and overall profitability.
The optimal dental practice tends to spend five to six percent of its total production on dental supplies annually. That may seem like a small number, but it’s surprising how quickly that percentage can grow and make a significant, not so positive, impact on the bottom line. Take a $2-million practice, for instance — five percent of that revenue is $100,000 spent annually on dental products. But often, practices spend between the 10 to 12 percent range on dental supplies. Immediately, the thought is to try to secure better pricing and reduce supply costs by shopping around. Is the valuable time spent by your staff procuring better pricing worth the one percent reduction to your bottom line? Your team could spend that time implementing a proper ordering and inventory tracking system that could make up that difference between 10 and 12 percent to five percent. Remember, a system not only saves you money but it saves your staff time — leading to more increased production.
Simply put, practices pay more than they should and buy more than they need without a system in place. Technology offers dental practices the opportunity to assemble data more efficiently to evaluate ordering habits with more informed decision-making. And not to mention the ability to leverage the purchasing volume for better prices.
For any dental practice to achieve and maintain success, it’s essential to understand budgets and take complete spending control. Leveraging the use of procurement technology can result in cost-saving strategies and improve efficiencies. Properly monitoring your inventory can lower carrying costs, reduce monetary losses due to expired products, and eliminate manual, time-consuming tasks. Setting streamlined procurement processes for your supplies provides a sense of ease for the entire dental team, which will directly affect your number one priority —your patients.
Systems are an essential factor that drives dental practices to succeed, and successful practices that have implemented inventory management platforms recognize that production is only achievable and maintainable, with highly efficient systems in place.
