Smart Storage Cabinets: Can Automated Output Make a Difference to the Bottom Line?

Over the course of my career, I have had a front-row seat to the challenges and opportunities of modern professional practices and learned a lot about how to make realistic progress in solving these challenges. At Affordable Care, the Dental Support Organization (DSO) for affordable dentures and implants, our team has finally found technology that can help solve two problems for every DSO and every dentist: workflow and inventory.

Affordable Care has grown significantly during my tenure; However, the journey was not without hurdles. Traditional problems such as outdated processes and excessive inventory have long plagued dental practices, often resulting in unnecessarily high cost of goods sold (COGS) and strained operational efficiency. Combining many practices within a DSO or not prioritizing the problem in one dental practice for many years will make the problem worse.

Last year we conducted some case studies to evaluate Zimbis smart inventory cabinets and we were very impressed with the results. We are currently considering equipping a large part of the organization with this technology. Here we share the results of these studies.

The problem of inventory management

In many dental practices, inventory management is stuck in the past. Traditional systems require manual counting, tracking, and reordering of supplies, which not only costs valuable time but also increases the likelihood of errors. This can lead to either excess inventory, which ties up capital on shelves, or insufficient inventory, which can disrupt the flow of services. This is particularly painful for cost-intensive, sales-critical items such as dental implants.

Additionally, practices face ongoing regulatory compliance challenges, particularly tracking and managing lot numbers of implantable devices and, of course, controlled substances.

The case studies in question identified specific challenges faced by Affordable Care-supported dental practices, including:

Inefficient practice processes: Time lost due to manual inventory checks and administrative tasks that could otherwise have been spent on patient care

Overstock: Significant capital is tied up in unused inventory, which negatively impacts the practice’s financial health

High COGS: Increased costs associated with maintaining and managing inventory, including emergency reorders and waste due to expired or misplaced items

Findings from the case studies

The introduction of smart storage cabinets represented a significant step towards eliminating these inefficiencies. Dr. Louis Visser, founder and president of Zimbis, is a dentist and former practice owner, so he knows the issues well, having “walked a mile in our shoes.”

The Zimbis cabinets themselves are designed to automate much of the inventory management process, from tracking usage to reordering supplies. They essentially expanded the dental practice’s workforce without having to hire additional employees; This has long been the process of capital A automation, but has largely not been implemented properly.

For the two practices we examined – the Affordable Dentures and Implants locations in Jackson, Mississippi, and Mesa, Arizona – the results were revealing:

Significant reduction in inventory: These practices resulted in a reduction in capital tied up in supplies, resulting in over $14,000 (Mesa) and $20,000 (Jackson) of excess inventory being lost within the first four months of using Zimbis (Figure 1).