A case can arrive digitally—and still not exist.
Even if a scan is downloaded and a prescription is attached, a case isn’t “real” until it’s entered into your lab management system (LMS). Until then, it can’t be scheduled, assigned, tracked, or surfaced in production planning.
That’s the reality behind one of the most common bottlenecks in modern dental labs: manual case entry.
When case entry depends on humans typing information in, cases don’t move at the speed they arrive.
They end up in limbo:
And once that happens, everything downstream slows down:
Most labs treat intake like “quick admin.”
But the true cost isn’t the typing—it’s the compounding effect of three hidden losses:
If your LMS doesn’t reflect real-time incoming workload, your team is operating with partial information.
That leads to:
Manual entry creates:
Even minor errors trigger rework, back-and-forth communication, and avoidable remakes.
Your most experienced team members often become the “catch-all” for intake issues.
Instead of focusing on design, QC, or complex cases, they’re spending time:
At scale, manual intake becomes a hidden labor drain—and many labs end up hiring for it, even though it doesn’t generate revenue.
Digital dentistry improved how cases are created and captured.
But most LMS systems still assume humans will manually input case details.
So labs are left bridging a gap between digital portals + scans + Rx files and a system that needs structured data to operate.
That gap is where invisible work grows.
The most efficient labs treat case entry as a system—not a task.
That means:
Instead of spending hours on data entry, the lab’s intake team focuses only on exceptions—not repetitive work.
If you answer “yes” to any of these, manual intake is already holding you back:
This whitepaper includes the complete breakdown of how labs eliminate manual case entry, reduce intake errors, and make every case “real” the moment it arrives.
