How to Automate Evident

A dental lab runs on the seat date

Evident makes cloud software for dental laboratories, the businesses that produce the crown, the bridge, the denture and the night guard a dentist seats in a patient's mouth. Its lab management system, EviSmart LMS, is where the lab's own work is tracked, and the wider EviSmart set covers scanning, design and production.

A lab is a manufacturer with a clinical customer, and it gets judged on two things. Whether the unit fits, and whether it arrived on the day the patient was booked to have it fitted.

Everything on the premises points at that appointment. A case arrives as an impression or a digital scan with a prescription attached, picks up a due date counted backwards from the seat date, then moves along a bench: design, mill or print, build up, stain and glaze, quality check, box, ship. Thirty other cases are moving through the same benches at the same time, each with its own date.

The office chases what the bench cannot see

The technicians are the part of a lab that works on the product. The office is the part that works on everyone else.

A box went out on Tuesday and a practice says it never arrived, so somebody opens the courier's tracking page and looks for a signature. The zirconia discs the mill runs on are down to a fortnight, and the supplier's site is the only place that says when the next batch ships. A resin lot is approaching its expiry and the shelf does not agree with the count. An outsourced milling partner has a case promised for Thursday, and its status lives in that partner's own order portal.

Then the doctors. One is on credit hold and still sending cases. One has not approved a shade photograph. One has an invoice from March. All of those conversations have to happen before the seat date, and none can be had by looking at a bench.

Evident already carries the case from prescription to invoice

Inside the lab this is well covered, and a lab should be running all of it before adding anything.

EviSmart LMS holds case tracking, barcode tracking through the stages, inventory tracking and driver route planning for the delivery run, with an AI powered production dashboard and technician productivity reporting over the top. The money sits in the same place: case invoicing, one click statement creation, automated receivables, collections emails and QuickBooks syncing. EviSmart CaseEntry removes manual case entry by creating and updating cases as they arrive. EviSmart QC catches bad scans before they reach production and flags incomplete prescriptions. EviSmart Nest arranges cases for printing and milling. Doctors get an online portal to submit prescriptions and follow their cases.

Every one of those acts on the lab's own record, or on a file the lab has already received.

A supplier's account area is not the lab's record. Neither is the courier's tracking page, the outsourced milling centre's order portal, or the practice at the other end of the relationship. Those hold the dates the schedule depends on, and each is reached by a person with a login.

The shortage shows up on the supplier's site first

Every surprise in a lab's week is already visible on somebody else's website.

The supplier's account area read every morning for the things the benches cannot run without: the zirconia discs, the printing resin, the milling burs, with a backorder date landing against the cases it will delay rather than turning up when a technician reaches for an empty box. Lot numbers and expiry dates checked against the shelf, so the oldest stock goes first.

The courier's tracking page read for every box that went out yesterday, so a delivery with no signature against it is known before the practice calls. An outsourced milling partner's order portal checked on a schedule, so a slipped date reaches the case and the appointment behind it.

On the commercial side, the accounts on credit hold listed before the next case is accepted, and the quotes that went out and got no answer.

The line stays where it should. A lab makes a medical device, and the record of what it made matters. The gathering runs on its own. Anything that changes a case record or an invoice, or that goes to a dentist or a patient, is prepared and left for a qualified person to check and send.

Chasing a courier is not making a crown

The scarcest thing in a lab is a technician who knows what a good margin looks like. A surprising amount of that person's week goes on other companies' websites.

WebRun is an agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in as the office is. It opens the supplier's account, the courier's tracking page or the milling partner's portal, reads what is on the screen, and puts the answer where the lab works from: a shortage list, a delivery exception, a note against the case.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and a workflow can be locked to an explicit list of sites. You can watch a run and stop it at any point.

The workflows below are already built, and each names what it opens.