Strategy: A Three-Pronged Approach to Maximum Efficiency

By Shannon LeBlanc, Chief Operations Officer; Hallmark Dental Laboratory in Halifax, NS; 63 employees

In the last five years, we’ve doubled our laboratory’s revenue and I would attribute much of that growth to our efforts to enhance our productivity and efficiency. The ability to continually adapt our processes and improve our workflows—especially as we’ve adopted more and more digital technology—has been a large part of Hallmark’s success. Our main focus has been on three main areas:

Clear expectations: We ensure every staff member clearly understands our objectives on a daily basis. For example, technicians have productivity goals based on a daily task list generated by our evident lab management software and use a barcoding system to scan the case when they begin working on it and again when they finish their part. Our supervisors can easily monitor those lists in the software throughout the day to...