Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26 this year. In a dental lab, the holiday starts a week before that.
Doctors want their patients seated before their own long weekend. Technicians have had that Friday off on the calendar since summer. And the cases that arrive Tuesday afternoon all seem to need to go out Wednesday.
THE SQUEEZE COMES FROM BOTH ENDS
Holiday weeks don’t get busy because of one big problem. They get busy because a lot of small, normal things land at once. Offices push to finish treatment before the break, so case volume climbs. At the same time your capacity drops, because people take time off and carriers slow down.
Most labs know this is coming. The trouble is that the decisions usually get made on the Monday of Thanksgiving week, when there’s no room left to make them well.
DECIDE THE CUTOFF NOW
The single most useful thing you can do this week is pick a last day. When is the latest a case can arrive and still ship before the holiday? It will be different for a single crown than for a full-arch case or a denture that needs a try-in, so set it by product line if you need to.
Then work backward from your own schedule. Who is working Wednesday? Who is working Friday, and is Friday a production day, a catch-up day or closed? A cutoff only works if the people behind it are actually there.
TELL YOUR DOCTORS EARLY
A cutoff that nobody hears about is just a surprise later. Put it in front of your doctors at least two weeks ahead, in more than one place: a note with returning cases, an email, a line on the portal and a call to the offices that send the most work.
Those calls matter more than they seem. The office that hears it from a person is the one that sends its cases on Friday the 20th instead of Tuesday the 24th, and that one conversation can take a lot of pressure off your bench.
LET THE SCHEDULE DO SOME OF THE WORK
If your lab runs on Evolution, a good part of this is already built in. Rush cases move up the schedule on their own, so a true rush doesn’t depend on someone remembering it. Lab Monitor’s Tomorrow’s Total Capacity screen shows when the coming days are about to overflow, while there’s still time to move work or call a doctor. Holds with clear reasons keep the “waiting on the doctor” cases from hiding in the pile.
And doctors who use the EvoDOCTOR Portal can submit cases the moment they’re ready, which is exactly what you want the week before a holiday.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR LAB
Pick the cutoff this week, staff the days around it and tell your doctors early and more than once. Then watch your capacity daily from the Monday before the holiday, not the Wednesday of it. A calm Thanksgiving week is almost always decided in early November.
GET HELP SETTING IT UP
If you’d like a hand setting up Lab Monitor or reviewing how rush and hold cases flow in your system before the holidays, our Support team is happy to walk through it with you.
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