How you manage inventory as a dental practice owner, can have a direct impact on the bottom line of your practice; ordering inefficiently can squander precious capital that could be used for training staff, investing in technology or marketing, while failing to streamline inventory can result in time wasted searching for supplies, coping with stock shortages or placing emergency orders.
Ultimately, with good digital inventory management and good dental bookkeeping, practices can run more efficiently, patients can enjoy a better experience, and dental teams can concentrate on providing outstanding dental care.
Here’s how upgrading to a digital inventory management system could benefit your dental practice:
Accurate forecasting of supply needs
Relying on last-minute checks or a gut feeling to forecast the supply needs of your practice can result in over, or understocking.
With a modern, digital inventory management system, historical patterns of usage can be analyzed, along with upcoming appointments and seasonal trends, to more accurately predict the practice’s supply needs. automating processes, and offering stock level visibility in real-time, these systems can be integrated with your existing practice management software, and even send alerts when stocks are running low.
Using data instead of a spreadsheet (or a pen and paper!), isn’t just less time consuming to manage, but can help you optimize ordering and make the entire process of inventory management, much more efficient.
Centralized Storage of Inventory
Often leading to confusion, misplaced items and overstocking, having supplies stored in different locations throughout a dental practice is simply not efficient, and should always be replaced by centralized inventory storage.
For the majority of practice supplies, storing them in a single designated space works best, and if it’s necessary to keep a few items in other rooms where they can be quickly accessed, maintain these stocks systematically and set up a restocking schedule.
Adopting a centralized approach to inventory storage is much easier to manage; providing everyone with a much clearer idea of total supplies.
Smart decision-making
With a modern inventory management system, data is automatically generated along with actionable insights, helping practices optimize both their supply chain and their budget.
Without such reports and insights, it can be impossible to track trends in usage, supplier performance, or spending by category, each of which enable you to make more informed decisions about ordering, supplier deal-negotiations and cost-savings.
Fewer oversights and inconsistencies
By making inventory management the primary responsibility of a single team member, you can avoid the kind of oversights and inconsistencies that often arise when the task is shared by multiple people. And when your management system is a digital one, the task is even easier for one person to deal with efficiently.
Once you’ve made the decision to upgrade to a digital inventory management system, you must also ensure that you’re using professional bookkeeping services for dentists. This way you’ll be able to take full advantage of the efficiencies such a system provides, and if you already have a bookkeeper, they’ll undoubtedly be grateful that you chose to upgrade.
Helping dental practices streamline inventory-related processes, significantly reduce errors, and generate more time that can be devoted to patient care, upgrading to a digital inventory management system is an investment that will quickly prove invaluable for practices of all sizes.