Small interruptions add up in a dental lab – Ashley Byrne explains the impact of admin friction on efficiency, morale and mental load.
When people talk about the cost of running a dental laboratory, the conversation is usually predictable. Materials are up. Energy bills are painful. Recruitment is difficult. Wages are rising, and rightly so.
All of that is true. Yet there is another cost quietly eroding margins in almost every lab I visit or speak to, and it rarely appears on a balance sheet. It’s admin friction: the cumulative drag caused by missing information, poor system design, duplicated effort and manual work that shouldn’t exist in a modern dental laboratory.
Admin friction doesn’t arrive as a single invoice. It hides in plain sight.
