Francis Casanova of Design Ergonomics joins Dr. Scott Mogelof and his team for a tour of the resupply area at Dr. David Ahearn's Perfect Smiles Dentistry (https://perfectsmilesdentistry.net) in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

It was such a pleasure to meet with Dr. Scott Mogelof (https://www.drmogelof.com/meetus/mee...) and his team. We hope to see them again soon.

Dental offices tend to follow one of two design and organizational approaches; roomcentric or officecentric. 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.

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 45 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 45 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.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us (https://desergo.com/contactus) to learn more about how to create the most productive, comfortable, patientfriendly, and costeffective dental practice.



At Design Ergonomics (https://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 highflow, highefficiency success.

Our sister company, Ergonomic Products (https://www.ergonomicproducts.com), designs and manufactures the most productive dental delivery systems on Earth, as well as the dental lights, inwall 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.