Audio file
Episode 401.mp3
Transcript
Hi Voices of the Bench community. This is John Isherwood with the PR team here at Ivoclar. As we wind down the year, all of us at Ivoclar want to thank you for your partnership, your trust, and your continued support. We wish you and your family a very happy, healthy, and safe holiday season. I'd also like to take a moment to thank Elvis and Barb for continuing to make this podcast so special, bringing our community together to share ideas, learn from one another, and grow as a profession. From all of us at Ivoclar, have a wonderful holiday season. And as Santa likes to say, May your days be merry, your nights be bright, and may all your smiles sparkle like freshly fallen snow. Ho, ho, ho.
Welcome to Voices from the Bench, a dental laboratory podcast. Send us an e-mail at info at voicesfromthebench.com and follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Greetings and welcome to episode 401 of Voices from the Bench. My name is Elvis.
Hey, I'm still Barbara.
I'm glad. 400 episodes later, you're still Barbara. Welcome.
Well, it's 401. You took me off when you said 401. I was like, damn, that's a lot of episodes. Good for us.
Keeps growing. How are you? How was your Thanksgiving?
It was wonderful.
Was it? Got to see family and everything.
Yep, got to go everywhere and eat everything, and I went for a run, so you know how well that works. When you eat 5,000 calories, it doesn't help much, but you know, a little bit helps.
Yeah, I know, but it helps motivate the run when you need to eat those calories.
What about you?
Pretty much the same. I mean, it's getting cold here in Indiana, but I was able to get a nice run in and then went over to a very large family. Thanksgiving where I was overloaded socially and then went home to enjoy the non-social part of it. Good for you. Yeah.
And you ate too much. What's your favorite part?
You know, I'm a big fan of the mashed sweet potatoes.
Oh, me too.
I can go that route probably more than I should.
That's awesome. I cannot believe that. Sweet potatoes are my favorite.
Yeah.
Look, we have something in common after all this.
For all of our non-American listeners, Thanksgiving, we just eat. That's all it's about. I mean.
Hang out, eat, and drink.
Yeah, pretty much. So the only question you asked for this holiday is what's your favorite food and how much of it did you eat?
Bingo.
Here it is. What is it, Saturday? I really have no idea what day it is this week because the lab's been closed since Thursday. It's Saturday and Indy's looking at their first big snow coming in.
Oh, what does that mean?
Well, it means for days we talk about a range between 3 and 12 inches. And then it becomes three and seven inches. And then it becomes between 4:00 and 5:00 inches. And now we're looking at about 3 inches.
So it's kind of like our hurricanes. They go right, left, right, left.
Yeah. And it always ends up being less than what they anticipate days in advance.
So they get everybody all freaked out. You go and get some food and think you're going to stay home for a couple of days. And then they're like, yeah, it's only three inches.
I think grocery stores are in on it, honestly. So people over buy food that they really wouldn't eat, even if there wasn't a storm.
Isn't that weird? We go buy **** we don't normally just eat, just because. We want to make sure we have it. So we don't get it.
If weather's coming, it's important to have every flavor of Oreo in the house. I mean, let's be honest.
Okay, it's good to be old. All right, so what's going on?
So this week, we actually get to hear about a new LMS, or what's commonly known as Lab Management Software. that's looking to make lives for everyone in the lab a little easier and a little more efficient. Seth Smith had a dentist mother, but really had no intentions of getting into anything related to teeth. But after getting into e-commerce and the direct-to-consumer aligner business, as we all know how that ended up, he realized that he built software that can answer a lot of a lab's problems and he created greatlab.io. But it's one thing to have the creator of the software on the podcast. It's important to hear from a lab that took on that risk of switching LMSs and wouldn't change it for the world.
Correct.
Yeah, Ryan Alexander was hired on at Vitality Dental Arts in Illinois in their marketing division. Like most labs, he ended up doing a lot more. and had to help run their lab management software. They needed to switch and even switch to something else first before landing with greatlab.io. The both of them, they talk about the robust features of this software, which is way too many to list right now.
Correct.
Integrating a lab to using it, and how it helps labs, and more importantly, the technicians, and of course, how it can help your lab. So join us as we chat with Seth Smith and Ryan Alexander.
Our episode with Jordan Greenberg, the HyperDent dude from Follow Me Technology.
I actually ran into him in New Orleans at LabFest. My God, tons of attendees were really picking his brain. It was refreshing to see that both lab owners and technicians have identified CAM as a potential area for improvement for their labs and milling centers.
Well, you know, Elvis, us lab techs, we're tinkerers. And it seems like CAM is the tool that allows for us to tinker with our milling results, right?
You know what? I think you're right. So I overheard a few conversations at LabFest about that. And I learned that there's a feature included in every Hyperdent license called Template Editor Lite. Now, it's not their full-blown template generating tool. That would be a little too much. But it gives their users the ability to make small, yet safe, changes to their milling results.
Oh, cool. And do tell, how does that work?
I don't know. better than to quote me on this, but some of these conversations went into a ton of technical depth. But from what I understood, there's a predefined range of milling strategy adjustments available to the user.
But I thought Jordan said they did all the template validation themselves in their New Hampshire tech center.
They sure do, right there in New Hampshire. Who would have thunk? That's exactly right. This is all part of their development efforts. So basically, as an example, the user can make adjustments to prioritize surface quality over speed or vice versa. Or they can make small adjustments to satisfy their fit preferences for every restoration type.
Oh wow, it's like choose your own cam venture.
Good one, Barb. That's hilarious. That's the funniest thing you've ever said?
I try, I try.
Voices from the bench. The interview. All right, Barb and I are super excited today because a gentleman reached out to me. Seth, how'd you even reach out? I think that was LinkedIn.
Yeah, I can't remember at this point, buddy. It's been quite a while.
Yeah, it has been a while. We went back and forth. You held off for a little bit because you had some exciting things. But here we are. We're all together.
And some of us are on video and some of us aren't. That's all right.
So from Great Lab Software, right? Am I saying that right?
Yeah, perfectly. Greatlab.io.
Great. Say that again.
Greatlab.io.
Dot IO Greatlab.io. We have Seth Smith. How are you, sir?
I'm good. Thank you very much for having me. Really, really excited to be here, of course.
Yeah, we're super excited to have you. But you decided to bring someone with you that you said is the man to talk to.
Oh, wow.
Oh my gosh.
Ryan Alexander, how are you?
I'm fantastic. How are you, Elvis?
We're doing fantastic. Vitality Dental Lab, is that the name?
Vitality Dental Arts, yes.
Dental Arts.
Yeah, you're in US, right? Is stuff in US? Because you've got an accent. Where are you from?
Identify yourself.
Originally from Ireland.
Ireland, nice.
You couldn't tell by his name.
So where are you at now?
Yeah. Where am I right now? I'm sitting in an office in Manchester in the United Kingdom.
Nice.
Oh my God, I had no idea. How do you guys? Well, let's just stop and start here. Seth, you brought us all together. Tell us your story. What's going on? How'd you get into lab management software?
So the story began actually about eight years ago, I'd say 8 or 9 years ago. And I studied computer science in university and everything, but after that I went and kind of tried to start like e-commerce businesses. And naturally, when you have your mother being a dentist, you kind of can't stay away from dentistry. I don't know what it is about that, but it is. And I, it's so funny because I was always like, I would never go into that industry. I was like, it looks way over complicated. Don't like medicine. And I thought, oh, it would be really, really cool with software around marketing or something like that. But Lo and behold, did e-commerce for quite a while and we built software, like this is like years and years ago, to help e-commerce merchants originally. And then I'd say about six or seven years ago, recognized that there was an opportunity kind of with direct to consumer clear aligners. We gave that a spin for a few years.
That was big in Ireland too, Yeah.
Well, how, like how? did you recognize that there was a market there?
Yeah, it was just because when you're in e-commerce and you could see this idea that you could send an impression kit to a client and you could sell a $1,500, $2,000 product, that's kind of insane for e-commerce because the average transaction is about $100. So it's like this 15x opportunity kind of when you look at it. Now, if you're in the dentistry industry, you realize there's so much more to it than that, which we did But the biggest thing we did, which was...
Did any of them last?
Yeah. The biggest thing we had was with clear liners was that we built our own CRM and built our own LMS effectively. So we built one that was completely different to what we have today with workflows. So we've always been in the nature of actually building workflows, always been obsessed with it. Then, yeah. And then lo and behold, about four years ago, we made a decision to try and do something around the idea of giving dentists scanners because we were transitioning to actually being like, okay, we'll offer the dentist these clear liners. But we're always the software intermediary between it. We tried doing the scanners model in the United Kingdom. It was extremely painful, some of the experiences. I don't know if we were just dreadful at identifying the best suitable dentists.
That's what I was going to ask. So just they didn't catch on.
They all suck.
Like what was that?
Yeah, there was literally like... I wish sometimes I know that there's some other companies have done this successfully. I would just say it's a different market and we probably weren't the best at executing on it because we probably underestimated how much support would have been needed for a dentist who wasn't willing to buy their own scanner. But was willing to get one for free. So were they willing to open up the box that they got for free in?
That's true.
I'm not even exaggerating.
They don't have any investment into it. It's kind of like, it's there, don't really care about it.
Unless you've got somebody that shows up and says, all right, I'm gonna give you a nudge. You're gonna say, we still did that. I'm gonna show you how to use it, and it's gonna be amazing.
That's a UK problem.
Yeah. And look, there's different types of dentists in the United Kingdom as well. There's private practice where you have government, which is NHS, which is National Health Scheme. And effectively, in some situations, I guess we probably might have given these scanners to NHS more so dentists, and they're never going to be interested in having a process that actually kind of slows down something versus impressions. So in a nutshell, we did that. But in the process, we actually always knew that we were going to turn this into software to sell to dentists, which we thought and just be a dentist LMS kind of system. But lo and behold, we would end up having it such that we'd built this quite a large system for effectively it was really for the lab. And then we started working with some labs with kind of our, let's call it our MVP, but this is a few years ago now. And then During a series of events, we managed to start working with a really, really interesting client who actually is a lab group. And we knew that like this was perfect timing for both us and both them. And we went in and we've successfully rolled out to all of their locations and we've had a wonderful relationship since that. So we've built a commercially available system over the last like, I'd say three years, but a lot of it was just pretty much all the stuff was built. We rebuilt it so it's suitable for everyone. So any lab can go in and get the most out of the system.
So did the lab give it to their dentist?
Yeah, so yeah, they give a client portal, but the biggest thing which we try to solve is that we don't like the fact that labs have to download, upload, download, upload files all the time. That's been a big thing we're trying to help them solve. So when it comes to lab management systems, we've noticed a lot are referred to as an LMS and they just book in the work and book it out. With GreatLab, we're trying to be much more than that. We're trying to have those scans coming in. You don't have to even download them if you're sending them out to an AI service or you can actually have them automatically sync with your file system so you don't do any downloading anymore. And then with that is also the CRM bit, which is our more exciting bit, which is which is reducing the phone calls. So we try to be more than just the LMS.
Yeah.
Interesting. Well, Ryan, what's your story, man? Where do you come into play?
Oh, wow. All right. Well, I've been working at Vitality for four years. Graduated college, got hit with the old pandemic, which is just a delight. Kind of hopped around. I'm like, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?
Would you graduate from college in?
Yeah.
Marketing and economics. which is essentially marketing is my job now, but with Gray Lab, I've become more ops because it allows that to happen. But yeah, essentially, you know, trying to find something good, something stable. I, my mother has known the CEO of Vitality's father since I think she was in high school. So my mom's like, why don't you go work over there? Jerry's got all this cool stuff going on.
Is your mom a dentist?
No, She's a mother. She's just a mom. A great mom. That's what she is. She's a wonderful mother.
So do you know anything about teeth?
Oh, no, not at all. Didn't really before it, honestly. The first couple of weeks working there, I'm like, oh, this is cool. I mean, when you walk into our lab, you'll see it's kind of like a Google-esque.
Oh.
You got a giant dog octopus on the wall. artwork everywhere, crazy woodworking, it's got like this recessed ceiling thing, lighting, all this, you know, Jerry is naturally, I think he went to school for graphic design and his father, his father's father, his father's father's father, you know, the entire family in dentistry, their whole lives. So Interesting. like inspiring. It's like, oh, hey, maybe this is something to invest my time in more than just, hey, I'm gonna go hop to another job after this, you know?
So wait, your mom knew the founder of The founder's father.
Founder's father.
Yeah. Founder's father.
Okay.
Then, you know, they were looking for just people at the time. Just, hey, you come in, help out here, help out there. So I started part-time. And then within a month and a half, I had actually went to the mid-winter within my first month of working at Chicago Dental Society. Shout out, shout out, free ad space. But it was like great. It was great. I'm like, oh, wow, this is nice. But I ended up working like 60 something hours and they're like, hey, we actually have to make you full time. And I'm like, cool. All right. I'm like, I like that. That's nice.
So what were you doing when you started? Did you get right into marketing?
I mean, I was literally folding boxes.
Oh, been there, done that.
Putting our marketing material in it, sending it out. And then I was also like our VP of sales assistant, which was pretty much being like, hey, go drive this case here, please. Hey, do you know how to download this PDF? And I'm like, I got it there. I'm like, I went to school. I got these things. I don't want to work a computer. But yeah, it was great. And it slowly morphed into just so many things that I was able to do that I would not have been able to do if I just would have stuck in the marketing lane, right?
Sure.
Oh, let's go to an event. Let's do this. It's like, all right, I get to do events. I get to graphic design now. I take all of our photos on our Instagram. I post the photos on the Instagram. I run our e-mail campaigns. I run our outbound mailing campaigns. Like it's been Because you have nothing to do. Not much. Yeah, I literally just spin around in my chair all day and wait to take rushes to the city of Chicago every day.
Is it in downtown Chicago?
No, we're located in Elgin, which is like 40-ish minutes out from the city.
Okay.
On any given day. Or if they're working on online.
There's a lot of labs up in that area. You must have a lot of competition.
You know what? It's healthy competition for sure. And we are one of the labs that we do not do outsourcing, you know, made in USA.
Really.
It's a pretty major thing. And I think it has gone a long way with a lot of our client base. we've landed a lot of these larger dental groups as well. And, you see some of the pricing, some of the turnaround times, and obviously some of the quality too, but it's like, wow, all right. Yeah, we can compete. It's like this is, and it's nice knowing that, some of these groups kind of hold us too. Like, yeah, you do have to make your stuff in the United States. And we're like, okay, no problem. Like it's such an easy selling point. And especially nowadays, you know, this care of stuff going on, whether you like it, you hate it, you're indifferent, like it does play a factor. So it's been really nice to kind of hold on to and maintain our entire means of production here. So that's been great. But yeah.
So how many technicians are at your lab? What size are we talking about?
I think we were at about 100 or so, and I think we've reduced, we've reduced, yeah, we were up there, we were a bigger lab for sure. We've reduced a little bit, you know, At least just for overall employees, I think we were definitely above 100. Customer service staff, before I go into the sales on GreatLab and how fantastic GreatLab is. Yeah, stop. I could not be more serious.
It's too nice.
I could not be more serious. We have seen just from our Ring report, right, which is, you know, call volume, you could do it daily, weekly, monthly, about a 50% reduction in inbound calls because we handle everything through the in GreatLab like CRM. Emailing doctors, but it's so what?
So you e-mail the question and they answer it, and it's automatically.
It's all in the LMS.
Hold and send it.
If the case is on hold, we'll actually send them a notification: Hey, this case is on hold. They hop into GreatLab, Hey, what's going on here? We can attach photos, we could attach scans, we could... blah, blah, blah, back and forth all day in there. You're not playing phone tag for hours on end every day. Oh, we made the call. Let's put it in the call log. It's like, no, it was documented. We sent a message at 1135. They responded at 1241. Resolved. No more. Oh, we talked to blah, blah, blah. And they said this. Oh, well, we talked to someone else, blah, blah, blah. We want to. It's like, no, all documented, all there, and it's timestamped too.
Do you have like a full team and each of them has like a number or certain number of clients that they work with? Or is it just, it's a system and whoever answers it, answers it? How does that work in your lab?
So our customer service admin manager, Jen, she kind of handles a lot of it. And again, sending a message, it takes what, 30 seconds at max. So she's able to crank through probably 10, 15, 20, 30 inquiries that might happen throughout a day. So that's been really nice. And it's been really, really efficient for our implant, our CAD team, right? You know, if we get a bad scan, you ever heard of that? A doctor sending a bad scan? No, never, you know. No. So we've been trying to identify that as soon as possible. And literally with another great feature, Scan hub, we're booking cases, we're booking in, let's say like 400, 500 from iTero a day, right? We are knowing within the second it gets sent if we need to send a message or if we could just send it right through. So that's been just terrific. And within that same breadth of, hey, we need to put it on hold or we can send it through, it then gets booked and then it's into production right away. Like there's no hopping all over.
This is not a paid endorsement. I'm just going to be just going to Ryan. That's very, very nice of you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Ryan. That's very kind of you.
Deep into great lab. Don't worry. But there's something I got to ask you, Ryan. When was your lab opened? How long has it been around?
Vitality opened in 2011.
Wow. I'm just realizing how bad I was at my job at Pre because that area was in my territory. I never even knew about you. And it was well after 20 and you had 100 people.
Yeah, we ballooned, not ballooned up.
How did I miss this?
I, we use Preet now through one of our corporate contracts. We use Preet a decent amount, right?
Yeah, good.
Because they're preferred. But yeah, we use True. True abutment's been fantastic to us. All the other, there really isn't a bad vendor or brand out there. They're all pretty on par with quality.
Was there a time you were running? your lab not with great lab.
Yes, there was.
Okay, so you had another system going.
Yes, there was. You say that a little bit like...
I want to know, you don't have to name the system, but what made you want to look for another system? And did Seth approach you? Or how did this happen?
So we had actually been a part of that lab star three shaped snafu. which again, I'm assuming Three Shape is gonna come out with a fantastic, amazing LMS, right? I know they're working on it. They had bought out Labstar. When they had that kind of transition there, you know, whatever that period was, right? Yep. There had been some functionality that was lost that was absolutely crucial to our contracts that we were engaged with. We were told to switch to another software, Magic Touch, which was, again, for some people, loved it. For others, Not as much, but Magic Touch did have this in-depth kind of reporting capabilities that we needed, so we switched to them. Yeah, and honestly, there were just some things, again, our billing department loved it, worked great, other departments not so much, but... We probably would have stuck with it. The thing that really kind of helped us was we had kind of a competing lab actually reach out and was at an event that we were at and it was like, hey, you guys have to try this thing. Like it's a Ferrari. Everything else is a Civic. No disrespect to the Civics out there, but this thing is a Ferrari. This is the one you got to do. So I had actually done essentially the entire Magic Touch onboarding, which is supposed to be a 120 day project or timeline. in like a month because we had to get this reporting done. We had to get it correct. Like we had pushed it off for a little bit and we were trying to see what was going to happen with this three shape stuff.
Just so you know, I'm looking at Magic Touch right now. So it's kind of funny that you...
Well, maybe we can hop on a non-recorded call and I could, we could talk about that.
I just wanted to let you know, yeah.
So, anyway, no, you know, Magic Touch was great, but that period that was just very odd. For a software, a lab software that is one of the most crucial things you could have in the lab, right? Obviously, yeah, so we had done that magic touch onboarding and it was kind of not rushed, but had to be hurried along. That took about, I think, from start to finish, like 60 something days. By the time we actually had all the features integrated, it was at about that 100 something day period. Wow. Which again, is not horrible because you're exporting a lot of data.
Sounds horrible.
Yeah, well, it could have been worse for sure, I would say that. But their team was great. They were just, it was a lot of stuff and we were trying to rush it to say the least. Sure. We were trying to get going as soon as possible.
Not in a dental lab. We don't rush anything.
No, We don't have rush stickers. Like everywhere around the lab.
Yesterday, let's go figure it out. Yeah, I get it.
So you heard about great lab?
So our VP of sales went to an event, another lab that was using it was like, hey, you know, just try these guys out. Yeah. I was actually able to export some of the, I think all the price lists, client list, you know, practice, whatever, practices, doctors, emails, phone numbers, everything, and then import it. into Great Lab and we probably could have been up and running within four or five days, like legit. Like their team, Oscar, I felt so bad for this man. I was probably ruining his weekends, his weeks. Because I'm like, hey, I actually get. Yeah, I mean, yeah. And then, you know, they're in the UK. I'm like a somewhat, you know, I'm like, hey, dude, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This isn't. And he's like, oh, yeah, this is actually this. And I'm like, oh, shoot. So I probably delayed our integration a little bit by like a couple of days. But yeah, everything was like ready to rip and roar. Like I'm sending memes in our Slack chat of like the kid dancing. I don't know if you've seen that one. Yeah, I'm like, oh, look at it. We're ready to go. Like I was so, impressed. And then it was like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, yeah. It was nice. It was really nice to see. And we were like ready to go right away. It was just fantastic. It couldn't have been smoother, honestly. And again, there's no disrespect to Three Shape, Magic Touch. They have their own thing. People love it. People use it every day. I'm sure it works fantastic for them. We just wanted to get something a little bit more out of our LMS. We didn't want to do what was a Salesforce CRM back and forth. We didn't want to use these other CRMs that are in our inboxes every day. It's like, Let's try to find something that we can maybe work with and is growing, actively. And that was a great lab.
So what do you think about that, Seth? That's like a huge shout out.
That's extremely kind of you. Ryan, Ryan, thank you very much.
Is that usually what you see is people coming from other software or they open a new lab?
You know, look, it depends. Like there's some labs that probably have tried to join with us and it just hasn't been the right fit because they have their way of doing things. And what we're trying to always do is we're trying to modernize the workflows and modernize the software. The structure of data is also a big thing. Most labs which I've seen is like they'll have the structure of their client list, structure of the products is quite messy. I get it. And that's just because the way people have built systems before. Because for example, in GreatLab, we have to... We have to fire out, let's say, an AI service for an Essex retainer where it automatically bases a model. So what you have to take into account there is, right, well, I want to create a flow based on the category of the product being orthodontics and the situation is an Essex retainer and it's an upper, right? So when it comes to that data sheet or that Excel sheet, those fields must be correct. and other systems. I've literally seen like lab product lists where like they barely have a SKU. People who are listening, SKU is SKU, stock keeping unit. It's a requirement. If you don't have that on your product list, highly recommend putting it in. But just having the fields filled out is really, really important. And yeah, so when we transition, yeah, look, I would hope that, I'm sure there's places where we can improve massively. I think we're also trying to go 100 miles an hour and make everyone happy. So We'll just keep doing our best and like we strive to be the number one enterprise lab software on the market. And that's our goal.
So what's the biggest reason people come to you looking for solutions? What are they wanting to accomplish?
What they're wanting to accomplish most of the time is to enjoy using their software for a start would be a good one. To enjoy using the tool that they have to spend hours on every day.
It's a love-hate relationship, let me tell you.
Yeah, and like the thing about it is more communication is So often, I often see, one thing when people take on our system, they'll have less talking in the lab because actually that's a good sign. So people shouting over each other, running around the lab, things shouldn't be chaotic. They should be like, they should be tempoed. And I appreciate there's chaotic, there's rushed situations though. But so I'm sorry, I'm kind of going on a tangent here, but the statement you said is what do people normally experience or why do they go after GrayLab? I would say that they can see that we're going to be the most integrated system on the market because that's what we're striving to do. And secondly is the fact that we also care about speed more than anyone. We care about the amount of clicks. We've really, really listened to that. We're quite a feedback thing. And if any of our users come on, I'm sure that they would say we implement feedback pretty quickly. We've pushed about, I would say we're pushing anywhere from 4:00 to five features a week right now. So we're working pretty fast.
Like updates.
Yeah, so updates are a little bit different because we have to time them out so they don't interrupt anyone and everything like that.
We always do it at 8 a.m. on a Monday, right?
Yeah. Yeah, that's actually a big thing. We don't deploy Mondays just for that reason. And then people say don't deploy on Fridays, but ultimately we don't have deployments where things put break drastically. The only thing that I say is that we try to get better as we're trying to build features that kind of don't exist in the market yet. that could be something such as like our scam hub feature. there's key elements about how we plug into those APIs of four or five different companies. And it's never been done. And we have to recognize, right, how do we get this complex situation where you have 5 scanners that have products like this, but labs that have products like Y? So how do we match up those variables? You know, how do we use AI to connect those two things together? So the things we're trying to do is a little bit different. And unfortunately, sometimes people get upset the fact that the feature that they, you know, it was expected to work like that. It's not quite there, but that's the nature of us trying to build something that doesn't exist yet, which sometimes can be a difficult elements to deal with. But look, and I'm sure the labs can see it, we listen to feedback, we act quickly.
I'm a technician. Can you drill it down a little bit for me, maybe one or both of you? How does it change a technician's life? Like what features for somebody on the bench or, you know, using a mill or doing porcelain, how does that implicate them or, you know? You know what I'm trying to say, right?
Yeah. How do you make Barb's life better?
Yeah. Perfect.
Well, I'll just say for this, right? So we were told we had no computers and not enough units, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, hey, we're going to start doing all these systems. There was Chromebooks falling out of the ceiling. Everyone found a computer to use. It was fantastic, right? Everyone starts using computers all of a sudden because they have to. We had enough things go to where it was like, hey, we wrote it on the lab slip. It's like, well, what if someone doesn't read the lab slip? It's like, is that a thing? What if someone doesn't, what if a post-it note falls off? What if something's not printed or like, you know what I mean? Like, it was just so kind of, it was kind of goofy, right? So we had something that Great Lab had was kind of this like task management feature and then also kind of like a, I call it like RFID light, right? So we created all these scan stations throughout the lab. So every case you're working on, boop, barcode scanner, barcode scanner, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They get booked into the system. It changes the status to, hey, this is now in QC. This is in milling. This is in CAD. This is right. It says who works on it. But the best part of it, pulls up the case right there for you. It's like you're, if you're missing case notes, like it's on a giant screen right in front of your face. Like it seems so like obvious, right? But like this simple tracking feature paired with active case notes, active conversation back and forth with doctors that you see on every case.
So it's live.
It is live. You'll see who entered it, who scanned it when, what location it was just at, doctor notes, customer service notes, notes that get added for doctor's preferences. It's like stuff that might not even fit on a lab docket, right? Are now just existing naturally into a feed.
Or when we start to write on the back of the RX, 'cuz we bring out the space.
Yeah, I don't think that time Elvis, yeah.
Possibly probably just like the big thing which I try, and this is actually sometimes why some labs might have wanted. switch to us, it wasn't the best fit, is that if you want to continue having lots of paper and writing out things and having that way, then that's the direction we're not going, because we believe in a world where you should be using the source of truth is digital.
So it sounds paperless, correct?
Yeah, we have a few labs who are really, really paperless.
You still have to have the scheduling ticket or whatever you want to call it on that pan, right?
I mean, You gotta have a barcode.
Something.
Yeah, barcode. So yeah, the barcode is the critical thing. Yeah. So you have a point of reference. Because the thing is, as well as like, I can't see if the, like I've watched labs where you have a situation where they have 4, they have the docket and scribbled over A1, A2, and they're like, they have to run over to the app in the person who had that phone call with the dentist, ask them what, which, what did they say, da, da, da. We're trying to get rid of that. And in doing that, we just make it so as have more source of truth in the digital version.
Am I understanding that every office that uses you has to have great lab software to communicate?
So your clients, like your dentist clients is what I'm thinking of.
Yeah, they have to have a version on their end.
No, they're just literally logging in like you would with any type of cloud-based vendor. Yeah, essentially.
Okay.
Yeah, to be clear, so you have a few options, right? Number one is every lab that works with us has a client portal, right? So that's vitality.graylab.io, right? Or whatever it is, okay? And then the other situation with the CRM, which we, this is actually one of our true philosophies, is that if I e-mail you and you're the dentist, you're Dr. John, whatever. when you click reply on that e-mail, it'll actually come back to me. You don't have to log into a client portal to get that message back to me. And that's a big thing about our CRM, which makes things different. It works the same style that like other CRMs would work. But in that process, we recognize that the reality of this dentist's behavior is that it's difficult to get dentists to change behavior. So we try to make it so the lab can have systems to support them in the realities of dentistry.
Yeah, I think too, just to add to that, you know, kind of the customer service aspect, right? Like the doctor has a login, then, you know, Or other CRMs or lab management softwares, you got admin logins, you got tech login. It's like you can just literally go in if everyone is sharing the e-mail and respond right away. You don't need to log in and wait for, you know, it's just straight from the e-mail, boom. Anyone can access back and forth real easy. it kind of takes it out of having to log in every time.
And if it's about a certain case, that note or e-mail goes directly into that case and everybody can see it.
Correct. Case-specific messaging. And now when we roll out WhatsApp and our other integrations with other tools, we're still learning the basics.
Here, man.
It's not going to have a part 2 going.
You know, just to spin this around, Barb, what's the pain point you're trying to solve with potentially switching an LMS? Like, what do you want to get out of future software?
So, we're building another... portion of our lab and we want it to be separate from the management software we have now. So basically it's reports, messages, doctor's notes, real time photos. Just like what you're saying, having the doctor be able to log in and talk to us where you don't have to make a phone call to every single client every single time. You can send an e-mail, they get a message, they answer it. You have less cases on hold. You have less turnaround time. You're decreasing your turnaround time because you're moving cases forward quicker. We have a lot of missing information, as you guys know. I mean, God love dentists, but they're not real great at filling out our exes and telling you exactly what they want, and they miss all kinds of stuff. And I mean, when you're dealing with 1,000 cases a day or a week, you can have a lot of that held up in this little hole somewhere that's not in manufacturing because you're waiting on a question. So I think for us, we're so large that to be able to not devote a team of 20 people on the phone, but to be able to e-mail and get these things answered quickly, You know time is money you get them back into manufacturing you start on the case the patient gets their case on time doctor's happy I think it comes down to a whole a lot more communication than we ever did before I think lab wide because dentists have no time so they're doing these things so quickly and we can't work on the case because we don't have all the info.
And in terms of like if you were to like pinpoint or any one of those things you can pick three things what three things would you, what are the magic three things you'd like to change? So you mentioned quite a few there, but what case you know?
Any like questions that we have?
No, like as in dream features, like things that like forget, like yeah, just think three things if you could get rid. I know one is the dentist gives you perfect information every time.
I think just reducing time, being able to send photos of scans. and show them maybe in real time that their scan's poor.
How often does that happen?
A poor scan, you know, you gotta scratch your head on that, because they can see it on the screen. They know that it's not great and they still hit send. So I would say maybe 20% of the time.
20%.
Wow.
Yeah, see, Seth, he thinks I'm joking sometimes. I'm like, he saw the numbers on our Engage chat feature.
Oh, so you agree? Thank God.
Oh, oh yeah. So like, you know, we have like, you know, thousands, I'm not even kidding, thousands of correspondence back and forth on, I would say, thousands of cases so far. And we've only been in it for a couple months. He's like, oh, wow, you're really using the Engage chat. I'm like, we are living and dying by the Engage chat, brother. I'm like, we are, this is literally saving us right now. Because we do, we have some scans, like if you can have the STL, right, everything is already attached when you book in ScanHub. If you could just pull it up, screen grab, right in the chat, there you go. Hey, this looks wonky. What do you want us to do? It takes, I'm telling you, it takes maybe 15 to 20 seconds to identify and then act on. Because I think that's the second-half of it, right? It's like anyone could say, oh yeah, that's a scan, but it's like, all right, well, what are we going to do about it? Are you going to have it sit on a shelf for a week and a half and have someone call once a day at 2 o'clock? It's like that is incredibly inefficient. So, you know, we have a process now where we send a message and we call no matter what. So you're getting the call, you're getting the message, we know your email's active. We confirmed with you that that's the active e-mail. It's a little bit of heavy lifting, quote-unquote, on the front end, but it saves our ***.
Yeah, well, what I like about it is so many times we ask for a new scan and we don't tell them why we need the new scan, and there's a good chance they're gonna do the exact same thing again. This way, you can send a picture and say, This is why we need it, and they can at least address that issue.
Oh, absolutely. If you're telling a doctor that they're doing bad scans, they're like, Oh, sure, I'll send it to another lab that won't tell you about the bad scans. Yeah, of course. Yeah, that's the game.
Yeah.
Of that 20% that you get in, what percent of them do you move forward with, even though you've said, This is not good?
Only if we go out to them and say, this is not a good area, and they say, do it, and then it's non-warranted, and so we'll move. If not, we would rather them go back in, take another scan, make sure everything's good. It's just like a distorted impression, same thing. Back in the day when we used to do models and we used to fill in the margins, same thing with a scan. I mean, you can probably make 95% of them work. Am I correct, Ryan?
I would think you could probably push a lot of things through, but again, it's like, what do you remake? You're risking, you know, a doctor overcorrecting, right? Or overfinishing per se. And now it looks like you're the bad guy when it's like, hey, we tried to tell you, like, we knew this was going to happen. Just trust us. Like, I get it's eating away at your chair time, but You're wasting chair time by not doing a proper scan or by not taking a proper impression.
It's either another scan or a failed seat. Either time you're going to get them in twice.
Yeah. Bingo.
And it's always the lab's fault.
Of course.
Barbara, just on that subject there, you said that you'd still continue with some of them. You say we're not going to warrant this, right? That's what you effectively say. Would that be like 20% of the time to just say go ahead with it?
No, because we really go out of our way to try to show the clients pictures of their work. And a lot of our clients are pretty good when they're like, wow, all right, so we'll bring the patient back in and we're going to re-scan. If they're not a part of that percentile, which I only like to be positive, but sometimes you just have those clients that, you know, they have their assistants taking the scan or they just are too busy and they say run it and we say, all right, it's not warrantied. So we do it and it's full charge.
I find a lot of it's because they're a nasty patient. They don't want them to come back. Seriously, they don't want to call them.
It's the usual suspect. So like on our end, it's like, oh, same doctor, push it through, non-warranty. We understand. Like it's not like a hit or miss. It's like, it's always, you know, the few that are just like, yeah, I'll fix it. Not a big deal. Which again, people, doctors can do wonders too.
And sometimes they'll fill it with cement and make it work. I mean, unfortunately.
So Seth, I want to kind of run down generally how this system works, right? So doctor's got, let's give them an iTero. We've mentioned that a few times. They scan it, they send it to a lab that has great lab. You're talking about it automatically downloads it and bases it and models it. And I mean, Give me a rundown, what happens?
Yeah, sure. So, ITero is a good example. ITero Scan comes in, so I've got ITero connected to GreatLab. ITero Scan comes in, it's just looking like an incoming order, similar to how it looks when you look at the six portals. It's kind of a similar thing, and then what happens is I'll start booking them in, and whereby I'll map the products to it. We also have things like automatic doctor and practice matching and all those things, like those fancy things. We even recognize that some situations, what do you do? when you've got a practice that uses the same scanner, we've accounted for those things. We've also accounted for the fact that we've also accounted for the fact that sometimes feature that's nearly there is the concept that you should actually ignore the products in the scan. You should actually just only reference the prescription note, because I can tell you there's lots of scans that come in and it says like implant, but it's like in the descriptions, Essix retainer.
It's like, people send splint all the time, just for whatever.
So, look, it's our job at the end of the day to try and help the lab by building software around ensuring that they can make their workflows easier.
So, it reads the script and knows how to schedule it based upon your labs. Scheduling and products.
Yeah. So that's more or less, yeah. It's more or less it can, with our AI mapping that we've built, it can more or less do that. It's not perfect at this, by all means. It's not perfect. And like all similar products, it's not perfect. But we are striving towards making that happen. And we are, we know that by Q1, we're going to have something pretty unbelievable.
Okay.
So with that said, when the scans come in, you can actually see the scans and you can see the PDF from iTero. It just shows it there. Because actually what's crazy is the fact that sometimes the iTero PDF can be different from the iTero information that they actually give to the system itself. So we have to, there's just so many failed checks. And look, it's again, comes back to the fact our job is to try and recognize those things. So with all that said, iTero scan comes in, I can doctor patient matches, and then it will create an order. So it creates the case with the files attached, and then the files will automatically get renamed based on that doctor practice, whatever naming structure I'd like to have. So you can have any naming structure you like with your files. And then you can pretty much set up another further automation to happen after that to automatically base in the situation. Essex retainer is a good one because that's quite a simple product. But our system is built upon rules upon rules upon rules. So you can effectively do anything. Anyone who's gone into a lab knows that every single lab has a different way of doing things. So we have to account for situation after situation after situation and also account for Dr. John likes his models to be 1 millimeter higher than Dr. Mary, right? And You just have to try and build a system that can account for the complexity of difference of workflows. So that's what you end up with. You end up with an order with all the files attached. And then this is, I guess, and then what you can actually have is that synchronize with your local machine if you'd like. But in general, we're trying to get everyone to try and keep all the stuff in the cloud. It's a really, really good approach because then you can like send it out to, like if you're, you know, the good one there, 3D model with SX trainer, you can plug it out and you can send it over to Hey Gears printer, which is one of our integrations. So it's kind of like a On downloaded workflow, if that makes sense,
so it will automatically send it to your printer, it will automatically nest it, it will automatically get it going.
Look, I can't sit here and say we've integrated with anything, but we've integrated with some very great partners and we're so fortunate to have them working with us, so yeah, so that's pretty much the workflow.
If you're running 3Shape, this thing will automatically set up your order within 3Shape and get it all ready for you.
We haven't, so are you talking about 3Shape design software?
Yeah.
Not, no, so we have not achieved that yet. It's something definitely for the future, but at this moment in time, what would happen is that you'll get to the point where you're pretty much creating the 3Shape order. So what often happens is people still have to create an order in their LMS. They have a piece of paper, they have a file system, they then rename those files, and then they, yeah, just It's just a lot of things. What we try to make it is just make at least three out of those four are close to automated.
And it's going to collect all your files and then it gets into design. Do you do anything after that point or are you just getting stuff into a lab system?
When you say do anything after that point, would there be anything that comes to mind other than the fact that like, oh, okay, so you want me to just continue through the whole workflow? Is that okay? Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. So obviously we'll fire a bunch of tasks. So we built tasks as well based on resource counting So something we're really excited about is the ability to show a lab their true capacity. Most labs, it's very, very complex though. And we've been building that algorithm effectively for the last two or three years, but we're now about to release something very exciting to show like you are at 60% capacity based on your team. And that's what we want to get to. It's very complex to do that, but we've more or less nearly got there. We're super close. I think ultimately the big thing I'll try to relay here is that we haven't achieved everything yet. We're miles away from doing it, but we're on a non-stop journey to get to the point of the dream system, right? So, following that, what would happen is your tasks get fired, your technicians do it all great, then there's, you know, you've got a CRM element, communicate back and forth, change this thing, product gets added. Then directly inside of it, you can of course ship it out. We integrate with every shipping carrier across the USA, nearly every single one, unless there's something that we don't know.
Unless it's Elvis's. Oh yeah.
What are you talking about? Elvis shipping. Just kidding. Integration coming soon. So we, yeah, so then, and then what's cool is the tracking number is attached to the order as well. So you can also do a few things like you can do practice bundling, shipping out, you can do a lot of scanning things that makes it easier. But yeah, we just try to make it end to end everything inside of the order.
And all this. data is given for salespeople so they can look at accounts and see how many they've done and what they haven't done, what they haven't done. They can yell at you for not doing it fast enough.
There you go. Yeah, absolutely. If that sounds like a great relationship. So I'll leave you there.
So what do you do? Like do you listen to your clients and when you have like so many that say, hey, we need this or we need this? And then you just add that to it and what does that look like?
I think this is probably one of our strongest areas. So I really believe that going in person is very important. I've visited well over 100 labs, well over, maybe coming closer to 200 now. And I go in and I analyze them. And I'm very fortunate to have a wonderful team of developers that work with me. We're an early stage company, but we've a team of about 12 developers. So ultimately we have UX people, we have stability, QA people, we have a lot of things. So because we ultimately, to be an enterprise system, you have to build an infrastructure that can support another enterprise. So what we do is we go in and we listen aggressively. Listen, listen, and listen to the pain points. Because a lot of the time, lab might say, oh, we need a button here. But it's like, but the reason you need the button there is actually because of a reason before that. So you have to think about the the reason before that gets you to the second, third, fourth, or their consequences. So we need to try and find what is the root of the problem. And can we get as close to the root? Because in this call, you're talking about there, 20% of scans come in. But I'm kind of like, how is iTero and Medit not blocking those scans from being processed? You know, like why are they going through at all? You know, so it's like the root of the problem is actually the scanner, right? It's actually not, I know you can say it's the person they shouldn't, but they shouldn't even be able to click send if you can see it's broken and it's like, and just and technology can see that. So obviously they don't do that because then the dentist wouldn't like the scanner, I guess. So that makes a lot of sense. But yeah, so what we do is we just listen viciously and try to just solve the workflows for the labs the best we can.
Do you interface with any of the scanning companies and say, hey, this is what we've heard or?
Yeah, you know, we have wonderful relationships with iTero, 3Shave, MetaDS Core, wonderful companies, and they've been great to work with. We're extremely grateful to be partners with them. And as much as we say that, it's just still, you have to remember, like, we represent the labs. So the scanners care about the dentists. So it's our job to build systems around those support things. And as much as I voice those things, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, like it's just, their portal's not gonna adjust to help those things that aren't critical to their work.
That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, it's just the reality of the industry. And like you just, and you also have to recognize truth. I think that's what a lot of the industry doesn't do. They try to think like, I can't tell you how many, a lot of these scanners think that they can like make a closed system, but it ultimately will just not work because a lab has to do with five, 6, 7, 8 scanners. And it's just, it's just, it's just very tough and it's challenging. So we believe in the fact that the system, the integrations must be open and we must try to make everything connecting. And that's kind of how we operate.
So Ryan, you mentioned you've only been using Great Lab for how long?
Since 5-1, 2025.
Wow. So not long at all. Tell us what's really wowed you the most. I mean, you've mentioned a few things, but what's really changed in the lab due to this?
Customer service for sure. The CRM feature is fantastic, obviously. Booking in cases, couldn't be quicker. Whether it's analog or digital, I mean, We had teams that were probably 50% larger that are now 50% smaller. Being able to identify.
Sorry, but if they send an analog, do they have to go and fill out the RX on the great lab? website for, or the portal, or do they still fill out paper RXs?
We get paper RXs sent via UPS and we book them in within, and again, and it's like, oh, the booking system is so much faster. It's like, no, it actually is. It loads very quickly. You could find products very quickly. You book in the cases, find the offices, the doctors. There's no load delay, to say the least, which is kind of funny to even mention, but Yeah, I mean, booking in cases, customer service, I would say we have improved, I would say like 100%, but we have reduced the amount of employees we have in these departments while increasing the efficiency, which is fantastic.
Wow. Yeah.
To be able to book four or five scanners, all from one hub, and just to grab 10 cases, checkbox, checkbox, checkbox, book, add product, book, add product, book, head product book, print, print, print, print, you know what I mean? Like, you want to talk about efficiency, it's like there's nothing even close. And we've used technically 3 LMSs over the past year and a half. And this one is, again, the Ferrari versus the Civic, to say the least.
So it's pulling all the intraoral scanners to one location.
Yes. and then they can be booked in by one person.
That's nice. You don't have to go to iTero and my Caden or whatever.
It is like a lens essentially, right? It's like a three-shaped lens, iTero lens, Medit lens, DS Core lens into one camera. So it's, they're all.
Nice.
And then just boom.
That saves a lot of time right off the bat.
Oh yes, it does. And it makes it a lot easier because you don't have teams of six or seven booking in cases. You have. Maybe 2.
How often does it pull cases from all those places? Is it checking constantly?
I mean, South, what are the numbers? Every 10 minutes?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's pretty much, it's either every 10 minutes, it can be every, you can also do a manual pull as well. It just depends. It just depends on the settings and the volume coming through. Yeah, different labs needs different things, actually.
Have you ever had one not get pulled? Not that we just kinda oops.
I mean, honestly, no, because we were, I can give you a story. We were running audits where we were in our prior systems. We were like, hey, this is being, this case is missed. Doctor called, you know, might as well throw like an Anvil at our head over the phone. Like, oh my gosh, we're the worst lab ever. What's going on? Blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, we just missed your case. How? is that not being booked? Oh, well, it's, farther down on the queue or whatever, scanner, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, how many times is this going to happen before there's like a decent solution? So I mean, I was literally going through and just checking every day and like a Google sheet, just boom, check, it's in there, it's in there, it's in there, just to have some type of stopgap, right? Like it was, We had such an increase in volume to where it was like, holy moly, we need to quadruple check. Like it is to say the least.
We missed one, man. It's terrible.
Oh yeah, you look ridiculous. And you're like, oh, we don't have your scan. It's like, oh, well, I sent it. And it's like, all right, well, where is it in the ether? Like, you know, like you don't have a good answer. But I would say so far we have not had to run a single audit. with ScanHub going live.
Nice.
I'm telling you, it's the easiest thing to sell to people. It's like, oh yeah, no, it just always works. It's always efficient. It's always fast. When there is a problem, I think, you know, Seth's talking about like the team and they listen and go into labs. It's like their team is really good at listening, but not just, you know, quote unquote Game of Thrones bending the knee. Like it's not, they're not just taking every single thing every client is saying and just, bogging down their system and making it worse. So they're actively listening, creating a solution, and then deploying it rather quickly, to say the least. I know there are some that get put in that chat. Great Lab has this ongoing chat of features. Hey, new feature. I probably put like 15 in there already. I think they're like 14 for 15. And the one that I put in there that didn't get in is probably a stink burger or something, but it's just, it's phenomenal. Like listening and then actively listening and then responding. It's It's been great so far, for sure.
So Seth, you go into more labs. I mean, do you still continue to visit labs now?
Of course.
To see how they're using the system.
Yeah, like, look, I've got an unbelievable team around me, and I actually personally believe as the leader of the business, my job is to still listen and ensure I bring that feedback in. I think that gets lost a lot, actually. I think people are sometimes afraid to go into the weeds. I often go in and actually, I'll go into, I was in a lab last week, no, sorry, two weeks ago. And I was booking in their cases. I have no problem doing that because I think actually what's fun, and that's actually like the difference of labs I see that really, really will take up great lab as well, really well, are the ones that like are happy to, it's not like... throwing a piece of software over to someone who doesn't really care too much about this new system because it's only going to help the rest of the team and it doesn't change their workflow. And a lot of the time as well, you know, they've been using a different system for 10 years. So you're asking them to change over and at first it kind of seems like scary. Very much. Yeah. And that's fine. So we also think about like, how do we lower that? You know, how do we make it so like, you know, there's a... There's more support. There's, there's there. That's why we have the office hours and that's why we have the onboarding system we have. And we built a new onboarding system and just trying to constantly lower fear of change.
Number one fear in the world, change. Yeah, Dental technicians, laboratories do not like change.
But I would say that won't change. The only thing that will definitely not change is I will never stop going into LOPS. It will never, no. Yeah.
And you have to. I mean, you have to meet your customer. I mean, you've got to, I mean, I love that about.
It's my favorite thing to do. It's my favorite thing to do by far. Yeah.
I imagine the biggest hurdle people have to get over is going from one system to another, losing that data, losing that history of cases and stuff. the integration from one to another. Not all of us have Orion in our lab. So it's true. Is it hard?
I would say the hardest part for it. We have a couple of customer service folks are, let's say a little bit older. I think it is genuinely just the muscle memory, right? I know I click here and then I click there. I know Seth brought up something about F5, clicking F5. Oh, when I do this, it's like, it is genuinely like riding a bike. You just have to relearn it and it's so much easier when you shed those old habits. When we started with Great Lab, there was probably the first two weeks where it's like, can we get this feature? Can we get this feature? I'm like, I'm not going to send that. I'm like, come on. I'm like, come on, guys. I'm like, just try it this way. It was specifically around billing. My girlfriend is actually the billing manager at Vitality. So she's like, I liked the Magic Touch one. It worked great. And I'm like, you know what? It did. It did. It really did. So I was talking with Seth, I'm like, hey, there's this, that, the other, ba ba ba ba ba, without giving out too many details, but he's like, all right, let's work on it. And then they had this new shipping feature and it was fantastic. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is like literally everything I asked for or could have asked for and more. It's like, oh yeah, it's quicker. It's easier to navigate. Like you do have to relearn that muscle memory, But as far as transferring data, integration, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, like, yeah, that is, that's a huge thing. And then keeping your data secure is another thing. But the actual hardest part, in my opinion, was the. Re-learning. Oh, you don't have to click back in here to click a drop-down to download something, then to re-upload it. It's like, no, Just click here. Everything's there.
Yeah.
Open your eyes. It's right there.
Some people that schedule cases, they could do it blindfolded because it's just, like you said, muscle memory, just ba boom, ba boom, ba boom, ba boom. Having to relearn that. But you're able to take all the information from an old software and just move it over or are we mainly entering everything again?
No, we've built systems to make it very, very easy. Yeah, good. Yeah, we've built a lot of systems to make it easy.
So much easier. Yeah.
I'll be transparent in saying the fact that we did not know how messy data could be and then, and look, we had to learn and we had to go, especially even like sometimes in the earlier periods I'd go into the labs and I'd be like, okay, let me see a client list. be bad and just, they have 17 emails for this doctor, but none of them are in use anymore. Like it would just be, and Elvis, you mentioned a really good point there, is the fact that sometimes people might be scared of switching because they're not going to have their own data. Like we do actually support a few things. We do enable you to bring across some of the orders if you need to. But I also would recommend, like, it just depends how much of that data people really, really need. People might think that like, it helped me one time that I was able to get a case from three years ago or something. Like if you want to put the order, you can actually do, we actually have a system where you can like put in old orders. The crazy thing about it is that a lot of labs that start working with us are happy to keep the old orders in like an Excel sheet and not actually bring them in because they've accepted that that's just there for the one situation three years ago. Yeah, it is a service we offer, but ultimately people kind of like a fresh start. And ultimately, we want them to have the least cluttered system, and it just adds a lot of value to be as clean as possible.
But I need to know that implant from 1997. You need to have that information.
I bet you do, actually.
Dude, my last lab had boxes from 1997 with implant information. Boggling my mind, those people are dead. Never give away.
Yeah, like an, just to be clear, an Excel sheet is the same as a database. That is what a database looks like. It's just an Excel sheet. So, I, because the pain of trying to restructure broken orders and data is not worth it versus just keeping it in an Excel sheet for those once-off situations.
This is great. How can people find out more about it? What's the steps to, if they're thinking?
Like you can just simply go to greatlab.io.io. Ryan likes that domain. He mentioned it a few times. Left it in a review for us. So thank you very much, Ryan. And I just want to re-emphasize it's not a paid endorsement. Ryan is very, very kind. Thank you so much, Ryan, as well, for those kind words. You're welcome. But we're just literally found at great labs. It's greatlab.io. That's the only place you need to go. And we try to keep things very simple, make an inquiry. Always love to meet new people, always love to meet new labs. And we truly believe there's not a single lab workflow problem we can't solve. Awesome.
Yeah. And you offer like a demo of it. People can check it out, see how it works.
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's very important you try the software if it's going to be this thing that you're going to be using every day. So absolutely. Yeah. And we want to make sure that it's very, very easy. We have a specific way for you to trial the software, which is a little bit different. But I'll let people come and discover how we do that.
I love it.
Awesome.
I love it. Seth, Ryan, thank you so much.
Of course.
It was awesome.
Yeah, just to say, Barbara and Elvis, thank you so much for having us. This is incredibly kind of you. So thank you very much. It was great to be here today. It's great to speak. And thank you as well.
I learned a lot too. And I'm going to put in a plug for us to check you guys out. Seriously.
That's great. I've written down your problems here. I did. I was doing. I was doing.
You just scratched the surface, Seth.
Thank you, guys.
OK, brilliant.
Thank you very much, guys.
Thank you.
Do you have a booth in Chicago?
Yes, that is actually correct. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, we'll be at, we'll be at, we'll be at the NDL in Vegas.
Oh, good.
Is that right?
Visions.
NDL.
Is that is that what it's called?
NDL. It's Visions.
NADL.
NADL. Yeah.
Sorry, NADL. Yeah, we're one of the sponsors, but I think everyone is a sponsor. And just so I don't know who's not a sponsor who goes to it. But anyway, yeah, we're one of the sponsors of that. So we'd love to meet lobs there. And we'll also be at Chicago for a bigger booth and everything. Please come say hello.
Awesome.
Awesome.
And we'll see you in Vegas.
Excellent. All right. Thank you.
Famous last words. Yeah, no doubt.
Thanks everybody. Have a good weekend. Yeah.
Thank you.
A huge thanks to Seth and Ryan for coming on our podcast to talk about a very important part of all labs, no matter what the size. Most people have a love-hate relationship with their LMS, you and I know that, because it's very much needed, but it can actually take a lot of resources to keep it running efficiently. With some of those features, it really seems like it can streamline a lot of other things that take up so much time in our lab, guys. Just the case call handling alone can free up hours and hours of your day. The great news is that they are growing and they're opening a US support office to handle our problems and to help us all get more efficient. So head over to greatlab.io and start streamlining all of the things that take away from doing what you love to do, which we all know is make teeth.
Thanks so much, Seth and Ryan. We appreciate it. That's all we got for you. And of course, we'll talk to you next week.
Decorate your houses, put your lights up. It's Christmas time, everybody. Let's go. Bye. Bye. Okay, you got it first, Big Snow. Look at you.
The views and opinions expressed on the Voices from the Bench podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the host or Voices from the Bench LLC.