The Importance of Establishing Consistency with Centralized Ordering

Given current advances in today’s technology, dental practices have many opportunities available to meet practice-specific needs. And one specific necessity should be consistency achieved through an effective dental ordering system.

Group practices and dental services organizations (DSO) have experienced the success of uniform business processes and centralized operations, including inventory ordering and tracking. But to achieve and maintain success from centralized operations, it’s essential to assess your current situation and the requirements of the group practice or DSO.

Practices implement management software for various reasons. For instance, budgets could be out of control, products could be depleting quickly, or perhaps valuable time is being wasted regularly on placing orders and tracking inventory manually. Consolidating functions and establishing a stable and effective routine across practices can create more time to focus on production.

Uniformity across all practices is a significant benefit of management software for DSOs and group practices. It is highly ineffective for each office to place orders individually, especially when the number of locations grows. Consistency is vital for success, and without centralized inventory management, team members can place orders without approval and without keeping the budget in mind. If this is how practices are operating, it’s unfortunately directly affecting their bottom line.

From a multi-level control perspective, local, regional, or corporate contact points have zero visibility of what supplies the individual office has on hand. Suppose a consistent and thorough routine is in place. In that case, these contact points will visit each office and manually check inventory levels to ensure that the product isn’t over-ordered or sitting past expiration dates. But suppose they do not visit the practices regularly to monitor inventory levels. Orders are likely to be approved blindly, and there is no way of keeping the offices accountable for waste and overspending.

By centralizing inventory into one streamlined dental ordering system, it provides a straightforward process for all locations. Practices can easily see what is on hand to ensure that more informed decisions can happen when approving orders, which also guarantees that the budget remains a top priority. Proper management software allows practices to set budgets that are allocated per month per each location, with the ability to review and approve before orders are submitted. Even though every office will spend differently — a practice that makes more will spend more — it should be based on production and not just size. Each practice will follow the same processes to ensure uniform group pricing across the board.

Implementing a comprehensive dental ordering system creates consistency, and consistency creates the ability for practices to streamline complex inventory processes with ease. And with ease comes the welcomed opportunity to maximize efficiency and profitability successfully.