Most dental technicians have a busy season. Very few of them have one that lines up with Halloween.
A while back, Lab Management Today profiled a New Mexico fangsmith, a former horror novelist who learned the trade and turned it into his full-time work. His story is a fun read, and it carries a lesson about case volume that any dental lab owner will recognize.
A craft with a calendar
The process will sound familiar. Customers take their own alginate impression from a mail-in kit. He pours a stone model, builds the fangs from temporary crown and bridge resin, polishes them and ships them back with a kit to adjust the fit. His customers are actors, musicians, artists and cosplayers.
Most months he makes about 80 sets. In Halloween season it can climb to 450. The magazine’s best detail is a theater company that came to him after the fangs from its previous production gave the entire cast a lisp. Fit is fit, even on a vampire.
Your lab has an October too
A dental lab’s spike rarely arrives with a costume. It looks like a year-end push from offices whose patients want to use their dental benefits before they reset in January. It looks like a large account adding a doctor, or a few technicians taking vacation in the same two weeks. The bench feels it before anyone in the office has a number for it.
The fangsmith knows exactly when his rush starts. Most labs find out partway through, when turnaround slips and the phone starts ringing with status calls. By then the choices are overtime or late cases.
See the case volume before it reaches the bench
The fix is to watch incoming work the way you watch the calendar. How many cases came in today. How this month compares with last month. How this month compares with the same month last year, for each account.
That is what EvoDASH puts on one screen. Labs can keep the day’s incoming cases, remakes and repairs and this month’s projected sales in front of them, and the Sales History view compares any month with the same month last year for an account, a product or a department. When one office starts sending noticeably more than it did last October, you see it in the first week, not the fourth.
None of this makes the busy season smaller. It makes it predictable, and predictable is what lets you staff it, schedule it and keep doctors informed before they have to call.
What this means for your lab
Pick the one or two months that hurt most last year. Before they come around again, decide what number would tell you the rush has started: incoming cases per day, a key account’s volume against last year, or work in progress per technician. Then put that number somewhere you will see it every morning.
See your busy season coming
If you would like to see what that morning view looks like with your own accounts, we are glad to walk you through it. Get in touch.
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