Running a lab requires wearing multiple hats – managing clients, employees, finances as well as day to day timelines and production schedules. We understand what it takes to run a lab and sometimes it can be daunting task indeed.
The key thing here is to not get bogged down with daily granular activities and step back and look at your workflow strategically. Working with a digital design firm is one such way to streamline your workflow and better manage your costs. While many of the large labs are already doing this, with the onset of technology and globalisation, many small and medium labs are also increasingly adopting this in a big way to stay competitive.
Working with a digital design firm may seem daunting at first with valid concerns on quality control – after all is that not the reason for your success? However a lot of this boils down to selecting the right partner, someone with whom you are able to build the right level of comfort and trust. This is by far the most critical step in your journey.
More importantly, what is needed is to know when to start to make sure you are not falling behind the curve. Below are some of the pointers that could help serve as warning signs:
1) Your are spending a lot of senior level bandwidth and resources in digital designing
Adopting and integrating digital workflow like any new technology would require you to spend time, resources and attention in the early stages. However, it is not an ideal situation if your and your senior team members bandwidth is continuously getting sucked into this on an ongoing basis. What this also means is that you may not have the time to focus on other critical tasks – such as nurturing those new client relationships.
A digital design firm can help you free up your time to focus on higher value add tasks.
2) Your team is frequently short staffed
Business is going great. More and more cases are coming in and your design team is frequently operating at over a 100% capacity. Consecutive busy days have a cascading effect on your pipeline and every once in a while your team is firefighting to meet timelines and quality.
Frequent fire fighting has a negative impact on your team motivation levels, directly impacting your work quality. Leave this unattended for too long and you risk attrition, loosing some of your best designers and all the knowledge and investment that you have made in them.
A design firm can complement your existing team and actually improve their work life balance and overall motivation levels. An external design partner can work closely with your team, helping manage your work flow peaks in an organised manner while also giving your designers the flexibility to pick and work on design cases that excite them the most.
3) You are not yet sure whether it makes sense to commit to extra hires.
You know that your team can do with some more capacity. However, you are still not sure if it will make sense to add more designers to the team – will there be enough work round the year for them? How to find the optimum mix of skills, experience and compensation locally? What about the lead times involved?
Don’t let your business convert into an HR operation. A design firm can be of help in these situations, solving your immediate business problems by allowing you to dip into an international pool of skilled designers. This also gives you more time to look for the right talent locally and add them accordingly.
4) Holiday season scares you
Everyone acknowledges the need for team members to take time off to rejuvenate and stay fresh. However, maintaining your quality levels is sacrosanct for repeat business. Challenge arises when you have to manage workflow and quality on a skeletal staff. Having on-boarded yourself with a reliable design partner can help you act quickly / wisely and be more prepared for such periods.
5) You find it challenging to keep up with all the latest advances in digital
Digital workflow is an ever expanding space and as adoption rates grow across clinicians, your team needs to stay up to date with the latest digital trends. But when do you have the time to train your team? It is painful to turn down work saying “We don’t do that” and this risk is getting more and more real with each passing day.
Ok, so now what?
Fortunately, ToothSketch has been built keeping these very needs of the lab owners in mind.
The company has been founded by two dentists who are passionate about digital dentistry.
We invest a lot of time understanding our partner labs requirements, offering them tailored design services to meet their exact needs. We can be easily integrated into your existing workflow and work like an extension of your team.
Partnering with ToothSketch could be a smart and economical way to prime your setup for growth and many of the lab owners have already taken this step.
If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you, write to us as enquiry@toothsketch.com and we will get in touch.