One call can erase years of trust.
A crown is already in the patient’s chair, then it doesn’t fit. Margins off. Contact open. The patient leaves without a restoration, and the doctor starts looking for another lab.
When you review the case, the cause is painfully obvious in hindsight: a scan void at the margin and an Rx that left key details unclear. Small problems… that made it all the way through design, production, and shipping.
That’s the story behind the remake that never should’ve shipped.
Most quality failures don’t start at the bench.
They start at intake and nobody catches them until it’s too late.
Examples are familiar:
The problem isn’t that these issues are invisible.
It’s that intake is busy, manual, and inconsistent, so the case moves forward anyway.
Yes, remakes have direct costs, materials, labor, shipping (often $50–$150 per case). Multiply that by volume, and it adds up fast.
But the real damage compounds in three ways:
Every remake jumps the queue and displaces planned work. It creates expedite pressure that ripples through the entire schedule.
Once production starts, you’ve already burned design time, materials, and technician hours—on a case that was doomed from the start.
Dentists can forgive an occasional error.
They can’t forgive feeling like quality is a gamble, especially when the failure happens chairside.
Most labs inspect quality at the end, right before shipping.
But by then, you’re choosing between two bad options:
%%ship a problem %% or %%eat the cost. %%
The smarter moment to check is earlier—before design begins—when issues are cheapest to fix and easiest to clarify. The challenge is scale: opening every scan, reading every Rx carefully, and comparing files across dozens of cases a day is tedious and unrealistic to do perfectly.
So problems slip through, not because people don’t care, but because they don’t have time.
Modern labs are moving toward intake QC that happens automatically:
The goal isn’t perfection.
It’s preventing the avoidable remakes. The ones you could’ve stopped on day one.
If you answer “yes” to any of these, intake QC is already costing you:
It breaks down the real cost of intake blind spots, what “AI QC at intake” actually checks, and the five questions to ask before investing in any portal/QC solution.
