The majority of dentists just want to do dentistry. When dentists are entrenched in their work, it is easy to ignore the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. I’ve said this before, “Dentists perform blue collar work in a white collar world.” Think about it. Dentists are doctors who get their hands dirty doing manual labor. You are manufacturers in a white collar classification- making things through a series of steps or systems. Within every system is a process. The more efficient the process, the more productive you become. Lean Manufacturing is a methodology of maximizing customer value while reducing or eliminating waste. Simply put, Lean is a system for process improvement that allows you to create more value for your patients while using fewer resources.
Your dental practice is your business. There are several systems in your practice that keep your business operational. Here are a few:
- Scheduling
- Recare
- Submitting insurance
- Crown Preps
- Room turnover
- Check out
- Sterilization
- Resupply
- Cassettes
- Taking X-rays
- Ordering
- Patient Check in
- Confirmations
- Hiring
Processes are all the things that need to happen in order to make the “system” work most efficiently. Dentists are experts at working in a process but not necessarily experts at working on a process. When you have been working in a process for so long, it’s hard to identify inefficiencies - called waste. I wrote a blog last December about these wastes called, The Muda Effect: Why Waste Is Holding You Back
Henry Ford actually pioneered Lean. He said, “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” Ford hated waste. He had an exceptional ability to understand flow. Continuous flow means the flow of value-add never stops - any time a process stops, lead time is lengthened, the customer has to wait and it costs more. Value is defined as anything a customer is willing to pay for.
Lean is a more recent term coined by John Krafcik in 1988 and defined in 1996 by James Womack and Daniel Jones but it’s methodology has been around for a while. While Henry Ford was the first to integrate process thinking in manufacturing, Toyota engineers took it a step further. Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyota studied Henry Ford’s ingenuity and developed it further and has long since been recognized as a leader in the automotive industry.
Lean can be applied to any business. I focus on implementing the principles in dental practices across North America. So what if you’re not producing cars. You are producing a product. A healthy mouth is a product your patient is willing to pay for. All the steps that do not add value to the finished product is called waste and all that waste costs you big time!!
To find out how you can LEAN into dentistry by implementing lean principles into your dental practice, shoot me an email abachman@desergo.com.
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