Author: Adam Thomas

There are 33,920 dental laboratory technicians working in the US right now. According to federal labor projections, that number is expected to shrink by 5.1% over the next several years, even as the overall job market keeps growing. Roughly 150 openings a year get created nationally, and almost all of them come from people leaving the field, not from new positions being added.

That’s worth sitting with for a second, because it changes the question labs should be asking. This isn’t “how do we hire our way out of a tight quarter.” It’s a structural, multi-year contraction in the number of people who can do this work at all.

Why “just hire more” stops working

Most labs still plan staffing the way they always have: when volume goes up, post a job, wait for applicants, train them in. That approach assumes the labor pool is roughly stable and just needs the right recruiting push.

The federal data says that assumption is wrong. The pool itself is getting smaller. A lab competing for a shrinking group of qualified technicians against every other lab in the region isn’t solving a hiring problem with a better ad. It’s competing for a resource that federal projections say keeps declining through the early 2030s.

What actually moves the needle instead

If you can’t reliably add technicians, the only lever left is getting more out of the ones you already have, and that starts with actually knowing what they’re producing.

Most labs can tell you total case volume for the month. Far fewer can tell you, in the moment, what any individual technician has finished today, where a specific case is sitting right now, or which step in the workflow is quietly eating the most time. Without that visibility, “we need more people” becomes the default answer to every capacity problem, even when the real issue is a bottleneck two steps upstream that’s invisible without real-time data.

Labs that track technician output and case status in real time aren’t immune to the shortage. But they’re not flying blind through it either. They can see where a backlog is actually forming, decide whether it’s a staffing problem or a workflow problem, and make that call with data instead of a hunch.

See what’s coming for your lab

The technician shortage isn’t a headline that will pass. It’s a demographic trend with a multi-year runway, and it’s already shaping which labs can take on more cases and which ones are stuck turning work away. The labs that come out ahead won’t be the ones who found more technicians. They’ll be the ones who knew, day to day, exactly where their existing team’s time was going.

If you’ve been running on gut instinct about what your technicians are producing, we’d be glad to walk through what a real setup looks like for a lab your size. Contact us

Learn more about ABS and Evolution

Follow ABS on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. Please contact us directly if you’d like to learn more about Evolution dental lab management software.

There is a call every dental lab in America takes several times a day. An office rings in and asks where a case is. Someone at your lab puts them on hold, walks to the bench or opens a screen, finds the case, walks back, and reports. The call takes four minutes on your end. It took four on theirs too.

Nobody logs it. Nobody costs it. It does not show up on any report you run at month end. And it is, on a per-minute basis, one of the most expensive things happening in your building, because both sides of that call are paying for information that already existed.

Two findings from the ADA’s Health Policy Institute make the case better than any lab software vendor can.

What is actually happening in your customers’ offices

The Health Policy Institute’s Q2 2026 update on the dental economy does not bury its finding. It titles the chart “Dentists are Busier in Q2 2026.” Chairs are fuller than they were the quarter before.

That reads like good news for everyone, and for the lab it partly is. More production. But look at what the same research says about who is in the building to handle it. Dental hygienists are the hardest role in a practice to recruit, in the Q2 update and the Q1 one before it. As of the Q1 read, only around three out of five dentists said they had an adequate number of them.

Hold those side by side. The practices your lab serves are running fuller schedules with a team they cannot easily add to. Every person in that office is absorbing more than they were six months ago.

The scarcest resource in a dental office right now is not chair time. It is anybody’s spare attention.

That is the person calling your lab about a case.

The math nobody runs

Say a mid-sized lab takes twenty of these calls a day. That is a conservative figure for a lab with a healthy account base, and larger labs will recognize it as low.

Twenty calls at four minutes is eighty minutes a day on your side. Call it seven hours a week, a third of a full-time position, spent transmitting information rather than producing anything. Then double it, because the same eighty minutes was spent inside practices that are running fuller schedules with a team they cannot easily add to.

The cost that matters is not the wage. It is what the call signals. A practice that has to call you to find out where a case is has learned that working with your lab requires labor. They may never say that out loud. They will not file a complaint about it. But when a competitor’s rep walks in and says their offices can see case status themselves, that practice already knows exactly what problem is being solved.

What actually removes the call

Labs tend to reach for the wrong fix here. A better phone system does not remove the call. A dedicated customer service seat does not remove the call, it just staffs it. Even a portal does not remove the call by itself, if the portal shows a status somebody has to remember to update.

What removes the call is a case status that is current because the production system is current. When a case moves through the lab, its state changes on its own, and the office can see it: accepted, scheduled, in process, complete, or on hold. No login queue, no callback, no waiting for someone at the lab to be free. Available at eleven at night, when the question actually occurs to the person who has to plan tomorrow’s schedule.

That is what a doctor portal is for. In Evolution, that portal is EvoDOCTOR, and it does one thing beyond call deflection that is worth understanding.

Every action a doctor takes in the portal, submitting a case, adding a note or an image, requesting a pickup, is recorded automatically as a CRM activity against that account. No one at your lab types it. The result is an account history that reflects what the doctor actually did rather than what a staff member remembered to write down. Six months later, when an account goes quiet and somebody asks what changed, the record is there.

For labs that want it under their own name, EvoDOCTOR can be published as the lab’s own branded app on iOS and Android.

The question to take into next week

Do not start with software. Start with a count.

For one week, have whoever answers the phone put a tally mark on a sheet of paper every time a call is only about where a case is. No categories, no system, just the mark. At the end of the week you will have a number you have never had before.

Whatever that number turns out to be, it is the size of a problem you are currently paying for twice: once in your own labor, and once in the patience of front desk staff at practices that do not have any to spare.

Learn more about ABS and Evolution

Follow ABS on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. Please contact us directly if you’d like to learn more about Evolution dental lab management software.

Ask a lab owner what would break if they took two weeks off, and most of them laugh before they answer. The laugh is the answer. Every lab we talk to runs on a layer of knowledge that no dental lab management software was ever given, because nobody ever wrote it down.

The knowledge that never made it into the system

Your system knows the case number, the doctor, the due date, the shade, and the units. It knows what got invoiced.

It does not know that one of your offices marks everything rush and means it about a third of the time. It does not know that the crown and bridge tech who joined in March should not get the difficult anteriors yet. It does not know that when a certain account calls at 4:45 on a Friday, the right move is to answer, because that account has never once been unreasonable and has never once been late paying.

That knowledge is real, it is valuable, and in most labs it lives in one or two heads. Usually the owner’s. Sometimes it belongs to a twenty year technician, or the one administrator who has been there long enough to remember three phone systems.

What actually breaks when that person is out

It is rarely production. Cases still get made. Technicians are good at their work and they keep doing it.

What breaks is everything around the case. Routing decisions get made by whoever is nearest instead of by whoever knows. Doctor preferences get missed, which turns into an adjustment, which turns into a remake nobody counted on. Exceptions pile up: the account with the custom pricing, the case that is supposed to ship direct, the doctor who never gets charged for the second try-in. Somebody has to guess, and guesses are expensive.

And the calls. When the person who knows everything is not there, the phone becomes the backup system. Technicians get interrupted to answer questions that are not technical questions. A lab that was quietly efficient on Monday feels chaotic on Thursday, and nothing about the work itself changed.

Why being good at it makes it worse

Here is the part that is hard to hear. The better that one person is, the less the lab ever needed to write anything down.

A lab with an owner who remembers everything has no forcing function to document anything. Every year that owner gets better and faster, and every year the gap between what the lab knows and what the lab has recorded gets wider. Competence hides the risk instead of removing it. It is the same reason the best technician on your bench is often the one with no written notes on their own process.

This matters more now than it did ten years ago. Owners are getting closer to retirement, buyers are asking harder questions during diligence, and a lab whose operating knowledge cannot be transferred is a lab that is worth less at the moment of sale than the owner thinks it is.

What dental lab management software can and cannot carry

Software is very good at holding structured knowledge and putting it in front of whoever needs it. Doctor preferences attached to the account rather than to a person’s memory. Pricing exceptions that apply themselves instead of being remembered. Case status that anyone can look up without interrupting a technician. Remake history that shows a pattern rather than a feeling.

Software is not good at deciding what your policy is. It will not tell you which technician should get which case, or which accounts are worth accommodating. Those are judgment calls, and they stay yours.

That distinction is the useful one. The goal is not to replace what the owner knows. It is to move the parts that are rules into the system, so the parts that are judgment are the only things anyone has to interrupt you for.

What this means for your lab

Do not start with a documentation project. They die in week two, every time.

Start with one exercise. For one week, write down every question somebody had to ask you that only you could answer. Not the decisions. The questions. At the end of the week, look at the list and sort it into two piles: things that are actually a rule, and things that are actually a judgment call.

The rules pile is the work. Almost all of it belongs somewhere in your system, attached to the doctor account, the case type, or the price list. Most labs find that pile is longer than they expected and that half of it can be handled in an afternoon.

Then do the same exercise in six months. If the list is shorter, the lab is less dependent on you than it was, which is the only real measure of whether any of this worked.

See what this looks like in your lab

If this sounds familiar, we would be glad to walk through what a setup looks like for a lab your size, including where the knowledge in your head could reasonably live instead. No commitment required. Contact us and we will find a time.

Learn more about ABS and Evolution

Follow ABS on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. Please contact us directly if you’d like to learn more about Evolution dental lab management software.

The National Association of Dental Laboratories built a two-day certificate program this year, and the reason they gave for it is the most useful sentence in the industry right now: the need for qualified managers has been identified as one of the top issues currently impacting the dental laboratory industry.

Not equipment. Not offshore pricing. Managers.

HOW MOST LAB MANAGERS GET THE JOB

The path is nearly universal. Someone is the strongest technician in the department. They are fast, their remakes are low, and other techs already ask them questions. A department opens up, and promoting them is the obvious call.

Then the job changes underneath them. The skill that earned the promotion, doing excellent work with their hands, is not the skill the new role needs. The new role needs capacity planning, exception handling, and the willingness to interrupt someone else’s work. Most new managers get none of that in writing. They get a title and a department.

What follows is predictable. They keep doing bench work, because bench work is what they are good at and what feels productive. The management half happens in gaps. Cases go late for reasons nobody catches until a doctor calls, and the lab absorbs the cost of a manager who is now neither a full technician nor a full manager.

THE FIRST NINETY DAYS ARE A VISIBILITY PROBLEM

Ask a new production manager three questions on a Tuesday afternoon and you will learn where the real gap is.

Which cases in your department are late right now. Which technician is behind. What is on hold, and why.

At most labs, those answers live in three places: a list printed this morning, someone’s memory, and a walk to the back of the building. A manager with fifteen years in the department can run on that. They know which doctor calls at 4:00 and which tech gets quiet when they are underwater. That is pattern recognition built over a decade, and it is not transferable.

A manager in month three has none of it. Every question costs a lap around the floor, and the laps are why they are not managing.

WHAT TO GIVE THEM INSTEAD

Three things close most of the gap, and none of them require a new hire.

Set the teams up properly first. In Evolution, production manager tools depend on technicians being linked to their managers in the Managers form under the Maintenance menu. Labs skip this, then conclude the tools do not work. They work. They just have nothing to filter on until the teams exist. Do this before anything else.

Give them the manager view, not the lab view. A lab-wide late case list is not a management tool for a department head, it is noise with their cases buried in it. What a production manager needs is their own bench, filtered to their own technicians, current as of now. Evolution’s manager schedule and manager dashboard do that filtering, which is the whole reason the team setup matters.

Let them fix things from where they are standing. Most of a manager’s day is exception handling: reassign this case, put that one on hold, bypass a step, print an updated work ticket. If every one of those requires walking back to a desk, they will batch them, and batching exception handling is how cases go late quietly. The EvoMGR tablet app exists to move those actions to the bench.

WHAT VISIBILTY DOES NOT FIX

Software will not make someone a good manager. It does not teach them how to tell a technician their work is slipping, or how to decide which of two late cases gets the last hour of the day. Those are judgment calls, and judgment comes from doing the job with feedback.

What visibility does is shorten the feedback loop. A manager who can see that a case sat idle for nine hours learns something on Tuesday instead of finding out at the end of the month. That is the difference between two years of learning and six months of it.

It also makes the training conversation possible. You cannot coach someone on a decision you cannot see them make. Once the department’s data is visible to both of you, a weekly fifteen-minute review of what went late and why becomes the apprenticeship the industry never built.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR LAB

If you promoted a technician into a management role in the last two years, assume they are carrying this gap and assume they will not raise it. People who were promoted for competence rarely volunteer that they feel incompetent.

Start with three concrete steps. Confirm the manager teams are actually set up in your system, because half of labs find out they never were. Sit with the new manager and watch them answer the three questions above, timing how long each takes. Then hand them the tools that shorten the answer.

NADL is running its management certificate program in Tempe on September 17 and 18. If you have a new manager, that is two days well spent.

SEE WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN YOUR LAB

If you are on Evolution and are not sure whether your manager teams are configured, we will walk through it with you. No commitment, and it usually takes under half an hour. Contact your favorite ABS Support technician.

Learn more about ABS and Evolution

Follow ABS on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. Please contact us directly if you’d like to learn more about Evolution dental lab management software.

Most lab owners find out their numbers are off after the month is already over.

Everything on one screen

A dashboard is only useful if it answers the question you actually have at 7am on a Tuesday: where do things stand right now? EvoDASH’s new homescreen is built around that question. Case status is a single donut chart — scheduled, on hold, outsourced, accepted — next to a running count of total cases in the lab. Below it, a KPI grid covers what used to take a handful of separate reports to piece together: cases in and out today versus yesterday, what’s been completed, how many accounts are active in the lab, what’s been invoiced, WIP dollars, and sales this month against a live projected-sales figure that adjusts for how many working days are left. You don’t build that report. It’s just there when you open the screen.

Built to show what matters to your lab

The two screenshots in this post are a sample, not the whole picture. The homescreen is built with a much larger library of widgets than what’s shown here, and which ones show up front and center is customizable lab by lab. A lab focused on collections might lead with billing and AR widgets; a lab focused on production might lead with case flow and technician output. Same homescreen, different priorities on top.

Remake accountability and account health

The part that usually gets missed in a dashboard demo is remake tracking, and it’s built in as its own widget: remake faults over the last 30 days, broken out by whether the fault sat with the lab or with the doctor. That distinction matters more than the raw remake count. A lab running near-zero internal-fault remakes has a very different conversation with a doctor account than one that doesn’t know where its remakes are coming from at all.

Next to it, a top accounts this month table and an accounts trending down table sit side by side, so a top account quietly slowing down shows up before it turns into a lost account, not after.

Built into the EvoDASH you already use

None of this requires a separate login or a second system to check. It’s the same EvoDASH your team may already be using — the homescreen is just built to surface the numbers that used to require someone stopping mid-morning to go pull them. Cases in and out per day, remakes in per day, and the full KPI set update as production moves. It’s on track to ship in a build by the end of July.

What this means for your lab

If your Monday production meeting currently starts with someone building a report before the meeting can start, or if you’ve ever found out an account was slowing down only after they’d mostly moved on, that’s exactly the gap this release closes. Worth watching for when it ships.

See what’s coming for your lab

Want a preview of what this looks like for a lab your size before it ships? Reach out and we’ll walk you through it.

Learn more about ABS and Evolution

Follow ABS on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. Please contact us directly if you’d like to learn more about Evolution dental lab management software.

If someone called your lab asking about a complaint from two months ago, how long would it take your team to piece together what happened?

Not a trick question. Most labs can get there eventually. There’s an email thread somewhere, a note someone made, a conversation someone remembers. But “eventually” is the problem. The information exists; it just isn’t in one place, accessible to whoever’s on the call.

That’s the gap a good CRM closes. And it shows up in three specific ways before labs usually decide to do something about it.

1. Your team gives different answers about the same account.

This one’s subtle at first. A customer calls in and gets one picture of where things stand. A few weeks later they call back, and a different team member has a different read, because the last interaction wasn’t logged where everyone could see it.

Nobody’s being careless. The information just isn’t shared. When customer history lives in individual inboxes and memories, every conversation starts from a slightly different baseline.

A CRM means everyone on your team (front desk, customer service, the manager, the field rep on the road) is looking at the same record. Same account, same history, same last interaction.

2. You only know what your staff remembers to log.

Here’s the part most labs don’t think about: the doctor is doing things too.

They’re submitting prescriptions, adding notes to cases, making payments, requesting pickups. In most systems, none of that activity makes it into the customer record unless someone at the lab manually captures it. Which means the “complete” picture of a customer relationship is actually only the lab’s half of it.

Evolution’s CRM works differently. Every action a doctor takes in the EvoDOCTOR portal (case submissions, notes, images, payments, pickup requests) is automatically recorded as a CRM activity. No staff entry required. The doctor generates it; the system captures it, tied to that account, visible to everyone.

So instead of asking “what has this doctor been doing?” and waiting for someone to remember, the answer is already there.

3. You don’t know which accounts are quietly trending down until they cancel.

A doctor who used to send thirty cases a month is now sending twelve. Nobody mentioned it. Nobody flagged it. It happened gradually over six months, and by the time anyone noticed, the account had gone quiet.

Labs with good account visibility catch this early. They see the volume change, they make a call, and they find out what shifted. Sometimes it’s solvable. Labs without that visibility often don’t know until a farewell email.

When your lab’s field rep can pull up real-time case volume and account history on their phone before a visit, and when the doctor’s own portal activity is already logged in the same record, the early signals are harder to miss.

What to do about it

If any of these patterns are familiar, the fix usually isn’t more discipline. It’s better infrastructure.

Evolution’s CRM module logs every customer interaction, tracks activity from your staff and your field reps in real time via EvoSALES, and automatically captures doctor-side activity through the EvoDOCTOR portal. It’s built into the same interface your team uses for cases and billing, so the information ends up in one place instead of scattered across three.

If your lab is managing more relationships than you can comfortably keep in your head, it’s worth a look at what you might be missing.

We’re happy to walk through it. No commitment, just a look at what the alternative actually involves.

LEARN MORE ABOUT ABS AND EVOLUTION

Follow ABS on FaceBook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. Please contact us directly if you’d like to learn more about Evolution dental lab management software.

Atlanta Based Systems just wrapped an outstanding LMT LAB DAY Chicago 2026, and the energy at Booth H-13 was electric from start to finish.

FEATURED PARTNER: LIGHTHOUSE

We were proud to host our guest partner Lighthouse Precision Case Tracking for the official launch of their game-changing digital case pans. These WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled ESLs (with gateway, access point, and sensors) deliver real-time location and status inside your lab. Right now they integrate exclusively with Evolution, the dental lab management software we have been perfecting since 2008.

Labs that stopped by saw live demos of case number, patient name, steps, and technician assignments syncing instantly between Lighthouse and Evolution. The reaction was exactly what we hoped for. Even two of our biggest competitors came by to see it in action.

THE ABS ADVANTAGE

For those who have followed ABS since the very first LMT Lab Day 41 years ago, this moment felt special. We started it all in 1977 with Summit, helped thousands of labs through the transition to our current Evolution platform, and never stopped adding the features and integrations that actually matter to independent dental laboratories:

• Local SQL database (your data stays on-site – it’s yours, you own it)
• Optional web services and mobile apps for every role in the lab
• Doctor Portal with case submission, status tracking, pickup requests, and online payments
• Seamless integrations with iTero and EviSmart scan downloads, QuickBooks GL sync, icortica advanced analytics, credit card processing, major shipping carriers and now Lighthouse

What truly sets us apart is not just the software. It is the support. When you call ABS, a real support technician answers (or calls you back as quickly as possible) and helps configure Evolution to match your lab’s unique workflow. Every new customer gets their own dedicated implementation tech. That level of hands-on partnership is rare in 2026.

THANK YOU, SINCERELY

A huge thank-you to every lab owner, manager, technician, and industry leader who stopped by. Whether you came specifically for Lighthouse or to see the latest Evolution updates, we loved talking with you.

The future of dental lab management is local, customizable, deeply integrated, and backed by people who actually pick up the phone. If you missed us in Chicago, we’d love to bring the demo to you.

Contact us today to schedule a private Evolution walkthrough.

LEARN MORE ABOUT ABS AND EVOLUTION

Follow ABS on FaceBook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X . Please contact us directly if you’d like to learn more about Evolution dental lab management software.

LEARN MORE ABOUT ABS AND EVOLUTION

Follow ABS on FaceBook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X . Please contact us directly if you’d like to learn more about Evolution dental lab management software.