Throughout my career, I’ve had a front-row seat to the challenges and opportunities that face modern professional practices, and I’ve learned a lot about how to realistically make progress in solving them. At Affordable Care, the dental support organization (DSO) for Affordable Dentures & Implants, our team finally found a technology that could help solve two headaches for any DSO and dental practitioner—workflow efficiency and inventory.
Affordable Care has grown significantly during my tenure; however, the journey has not been without hurdles. Traditional pain points such as antiquated processes and bloated inventory levels have long plagued dental practices, often leading to unnecessarily high costs of goods sold (COGS) and strained operational efficiencies. Combine many practices within a DSO or not prioritize the problem in a dental practice for many years, and you compound the problem.
Last year, we conducted a couple of case studies to evaluate smart inventory cabinets from Zimbis, and we were very impressed with the results. We are now considering equipping a large portion of the organization with this technology. Here, we’ll share the results of these studies.
The problem of inventory management
In many dental practices, inventory management remains stuck in the past. Conventional systems involve manual counting, tracking, and reordering of supplies, which not only consumes valuable time but also increases the likelihood of errors. This can lead to either excess inventory, which ties up capital on shelves, or insufficient stock, which can disrupt the flow of services. This is especially painful for high-cost, revenue-critical items such as dental implants.
Furthermore, practices face ongoing challenges with regulatory compliance, particularly in tracking and managing lot numbers of implantable devices, and, of course, controlled substances.
The case studies in question identified specific challenges faced by Affordable Care’s supported dental practices, including:
Inefficient practice workflows: Time lost in manual inventory checks and administrative tasks that could otherwise have been spent on patient care
Excess inventory: Substantial capital locked up in unused supplies, affecting the practice’s financial health
High COGS: Elevated costs associated with maintaining and managing inventory, including emergency reordering and waste due to expired or misplaced items
Insights from the case studies
The introduction of smart inventory cabinets represented a significant leap toward addressing these inefficiencies. Dr. Louis Visser, Zimbis founder and president, is a dentist and former practice owner, so he understands the problems intimately, having “walked a mile in our shoes.”
The Zimbis cabinets themselves are designed to automate much of the inventory management process, from tracking usage to reordering supplies. They essentially expanded the dental practice staff footprint without having to hire additional employees; this has been the process of capital-A automation for a long time but largely hasn’t been well realized until now.
For the two practices we looked at—Affordable Dentures and Implants locations in Jackson, Mississippi, and Mesa, Arizona, the results were telling:
Significant reduction in on-hand inventory: These practices saw a reduction in the amount of capital tied up in supplies, shedding over $14,000 (Mesa) and $20,000 (Jackson) of excess inventory within the first four months of using Zimbis (figure 1).
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