Control and order

There are many different aspects to running a successful dental practice. The quality of the clinical work provided is of course hugely important, as is the commercial side of business with marketing and PR exercises increasingly apparent in the market. Alongside these though is the less glamorous, but equally crucial task of administration. Without successful administration, a dental practice simply couldn’t operate, and a subdivision of this is the ordering and processing of equipment and stock.

When the management of stock is not properly organised it can have a huge impact on the running of a practice. If stock is over-ordered it could lead to a problem with a practice’s immediate cashflow, or even worse wasting money with materials going out of date before being used. On the flip side if there aren’t adequate supplies it could mean having to pay extra for immediate delivery of items from suppliers or the disaster of directly affecting patient care by having to cancel treatments until the goods arrive. The damage something like this could do to a practice’s reputation is potentially far worse than any immediate financial loss. Though that is an extreme example, I would be surprised if most practice’s inventory systems ran as efficiently as they might do. Sometimes you don’t know something is broken until you have the opportunity to fix it.