Nikki resupplies Slatwall (www.ergonomic-...) and Stratus Workstation (www.ergonomic-...) bins at Dr. David Ahearn's Perfect Smiles Dentistry.
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Dental offices tend to follow one of two design and organizational approaches; room-centric or office-centric. Which of the two your practice follows is the first determination you need to make when considering how you will set up your deployment, sterilization, and resupply systems.
- Room-centric: treatment rooms are stocked with the bulk of all required materials and supplies.
- Office-centric: 80% of all inventory is stocked in a centralized supply area and only a carefully selected array of supplies and materials are maintained in the ops.
ROOM-CENTRIC
A room-centric practice is comprised of treatment rooms that are fully stocked at all times with several weeks’ worth of supplies and consumables. These rooms typically have extensive cabinetry, both on the side and at the head walls, to help store all of these items.
While possible in a 3 or 4 op practice, this method of stocking your treatment rooms is archaic at best and - more likely - grossly inefficient. Further, maintaining 100% service capability across a larger number of ops is more than an inefficient use of inventory; it’s an enormous waste of time, and can have a negative impact on your ability to provide treatment. The odds that every item you need will be where you need it - when you need it - quickly approach zero. Here are a few major issues with this setup:
‣ Bulky, expensive cabinetry dominates the room. This creates larger rooms that feel smaller and cost more than the alternative.
‣ Restocking becomes a very labor-intensive task. Bringing large amounts of supplies to each op is very inefficient, and the chances that every drawer in every room will be identically stocked are slim at best.
‣ Visual setup and restocking is impossible. Without opening every drawer and cabinet, you really don’t know what you have on-hand.
‣ The additional work surfaces add to the area requiring disinfection. This will dramatically increase the time it takes to turn over a room.
OFFICE-CENTRIC
In an office-centric practice the vast majority of supplies will be kept in a central resupply area. Only small quantities of thoughtfully selected, frequently used materials are actually kept in the treatment rooms.
Ideally, each of your rooms will be stocked to fully accommodate your 90% Procedure Profile. The materials for less-frequent procedures (e.g., endo, ortho, sedation, surgery, etc.) will be available for chairside delivery at a moment’s notice through the use of separate, procedure-specific supply tubs (implants, dentures, etc.) and readily deployable mobile carts.
The question then becomes, how much material will “fully accommodate” your core procedures? For a streamlined system, a single week’s worth of supplies provides an excellent balance between volume and restocking requirements, and makes for sensible scheduling. We refer to this consolidation of commonly used materials as the “Single Week / 90% Rule.”
A typical ratio of supplies in sterilization to supplies in the operatories is 4:1. Therefore, if you are stocked for one week’s worth of typical dental procedures within your rooms, your supply area will have 4-5 weeks’ worth. This allows you to order supplies once a month (again, a sensible scheduling unit) and still maintain your capacity during above average demand.
Of course, in actual practice your procedure frequency (and supply use) will vary from week to week. With that in mind, it’s advisable to build in a margin that accommodates spikes in usage - especially in operatories where spikes will happen quicker, giving you less time to react. So instead of stocking treatment rooms with 7 days worth of material, stock with 10. Similarly, instead of 4-5 weeks in central inventory, we recommend stocking to a full 6. It’s always better to have supplies and not need them than to need supplies and not have them.
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At Design Ergonomics (www.desergo.com), we help dentists create the most efficient, productive, and beautiful practices to meet their unique goals. Our design approach, developed over 25 years of working exclusively for the dental industry, has a proven track record for high-flow, high-efficiency success.
Our sister company, Ergonomic Products (www.ergonomic-...), designs and manufactures the most productive dental delivery systems on Earth, as well as the dental lights, in-wall cabinets, dental patient chairs, and sterilization centers to support their systems of enhanced dental delivery. Their dental delivery workstation has been an essential part of the performance revolution that has made much of the dental office workflow improvements at Design Ergonomics possible.