Canadian Orthodontics Practice: Bracing for Patients

Dr. Jay Jayson, an orthodontist, had recently completed renovating the waiting area of his office and now needed to decide whether he should also renovate the treatment areas. He considered the advantages and disadvantages of his current clinic setup: he thought that the reception environment was comfortable, and that the patients felt confident in the treatment and process, but he was concerned about the impact on patients of any delays in care. He also realized that he had one new patient consultation room that could be pulled into service as a treatment chair. Would hiring more registered dental assistants help him treat more patients? Was there another way to see more patients without renovating the office?

This exercise is appropriate for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on operations management, business process management, or supply chain management. It could be used in a service operations course as a review of operations management concepts. It would appeal to participants in executive education programs, who could more likely relate the concepts to a small business, office, or medical setting than to an industrial or manufacturing process. The exercise introduces some basic operations management concepts, specifically in the area of process analysis. Students use a process flowchart to model a treatment process and resource constraints to determine capacity, use detailed timeline charts to determine the best number of employees to schedule, and evaluate other service business management issues external to the process. This exercise will also allow students to do the following:<ul><li>Examine a service organization to understand and apply basic operations management concepts including process analysis, process flowcharts, throughput (flow) time, utilization, cycle time, bottlenecks or constraints, and capacity.</li><li>Use a grid timeline template to illustrate how these concepts affect a specific situation.</li><li>Determine the impact of varying resources on utilization, cycle time, bottlenecks, and capacity.</li><li>Explain how process analysis can help small businesses and entrepreneurs make better decisions.</li><li>Describe the relevance of these concepts in both service and manufacturing industries.</li></ul>

• business process management
• process flowchart
• throughput time
• capacity
• scheduling
• utilization