Manual Re-Keying in a Dental Laboratory: How Many Hours Do You Lose Each Month?

A case arrives. You read the prescription, you note the dentist, the shade, the due date. Then you open your lab management system and type it all again. That re-keying produces nothing: it moves information from one screen to another. And it comes back with every case, every day. The question is not whether it costs you time, but how much. Here is how to put a figure on it, and what you get back by automating it.

Why re-keying stays production's blind spot

Digital impressions have won the practices over. On the laboratory side, the inbound flow went digital without the paperwork following. The file does arrive in digital form, but the case itself is still typed in by hand in most laboratories.

The sector is under strain. France counts close to 3,600 dental laboratories for 18,100 people working in them, a fabric that consolidates year after year. In that context, every unproductive hour lands directly on the margin. Re-keying is one of those hours.

It stays invisible because it appears on no invoice. Nobody bills the time spent copying out a shade or a case number. It dissolves into the day, between two technical tasks, and ends up feeling normal. That is exactly what makes it dangerous: a cost you do not measure is a cost you never reduce.

And this administrative flow grows with digital. The more your dentists scan, the more cases you receive, and the longer the entry queue gets. Going digital on the practice side moves the load to your back office instead of lightening it. As long as the case passes through a keyboard, the bottleneck stays whole.

What a re-typed case really costs you

Put numbers on the feeling. Analyses of order entry across industries place a manual entry at between 5 and 15 minutes depending on its complexity. The figure is cross-sector, but the order of magnitude speaks to any laboratory. In a dental laboratory, a range of 5 to 8 minutes per case is realistic. You have to read the prescription, identify the dentist, create the record, then fill in the type of work, the shade and the dates.

Run the calculation on your own volume. This is a method, not a ready-made figure: your real cases always win. Take the number of cases you handle in a day, multiply by the entry time for one case, then by the number of days worked.

An example sets the mechanics. A laboratory receiving 30 cases a day, at 6 minutes of entry each, a deliberately cautious assumption, ties up 3 hours of work daily on re-keying alone. Over a month of 20 working days, that comes to around 60 hours. At the scale of one position, you are close to a half-time job spent copying out what already exists in digital form elsewhere.

Turn those hours into euros with your own labor cost. According to Indeed, the average pay for a dental technician sits at around 16.37 € an hour gross. Loaded cost for the employer runs clearly higher. On the 60 monthly hours of our example, this is a recurring monthly budget spent moving information, with no prosthetic value added.

The point of the calculation is not the exact result. It is to make visible a spend you already carry. Once the figure is down, the decision to automate or not becomes a clear trade-off rather than an instinct.

The hidden cost: what double entry adds to the hours

Time is only the visible part. Re-keying also introduces errors, and an error on a case costs far more than the minute you were trying to save.

The trade knows the risk. Vendors of lab management software make the point: automating entry reduces case errors. Every field copied by hand is a chance to get it wrong. Multiplied by the many fields on a record and by hundreds of cases a month, those chances produce several wrong cases every month.

And not all errors are equal. A shade copied wrong is a crown to remake. A case attached to the wrong dentist in a practice that has several is a restoration delivered under the wrong name and an invoice to redo. A try-in dated wrong is a patient who travels for nothing. Each error sets off a call, a remake, sometimes a refusal. The real cost of a re-keyed case therefore adds the entry time to the risk of a remake.

These errors are nearly always born in the same place. It is the moment when correct information is copied by hand from one medium to another. As long as that manual transfer exists, the error window stays open, whatever the rigor of the team.

There is one more layer that many forget. A digital impression identifies a patient: it is health data. Copying it into Excel files or unsecured emails takes you outside the regulatory framework. In France, hosting that data requires a certified provider, as the Agence du Numérique en Santé sets out. The obligation comes from article L.1111-8 of the Code de la santé publique, the French public health code. Scattered entry is not only inefficient: it weakens your compliance.

How automation removes re-keying

Automating re-keying does not mean typing faster. It means the case is not typed at all any more. The file and its prescription arrive together, and the information lands straight in your lab management system.

The mechanism is easy to follow. When the dentist's case enters a platform connected to your chain, the production record creates itself. It comes filled in: dentist identified, type of work, due dates. The technician confirms instead of typing. Double entry disappears, and with it the main source of error.

The gain is large, because you stop moving information and let it travel. The case is no longer entered, only checked. Brought back to our example, the 60 monthly hours of re-keying melt down to a handful, the time it takes to check the records generated automatically.

This is the approach DigiLab takes. The platform gathers impressions from the scanners on the market into a single inbox. It then pushes each case to your CAD tools and your ERP, metadata included. The case is not copied out: it travels. DigiLab for its part claims up to one full-time equivalent saved per month and a start-up in under ten minutes. The detail of the multi-scanner coverage and the connectors sets out what enters the automated flow.

The benefit goes beyond the hours recovered. By removing manual entry, you also remove the error window it opened. Health data stays inside a compliant hosted environment, traced end to end, instead of passing through inboxes. You gain time and you cut risk in the same move.

The gain is not marginal, because the pressure will only rise. Digital impressions are settling in on the practice side for good: the intraoral scanner market is growing at around 11% a year through 2031. Your dentists will scan more, and the volume of incoming cases will follow the same curve. A laboratory that automates reception today absorbs that rise without hiring for data entry. A laboratory that stays on re-keying will instead watch its administrative hours swell as digital advances on the dentist's side.

So the right reading is not only accounting. It is also a capacity question: with the same headcount, removing re-keying frees technical time to produce more cases. The hours given back do not vanish, they move to manufacturing, where your margin sits.

Should you automate in your laboratory? The decision grid

Automation is not worth the same to everyone. It depends on your volume and your mix of dentists. The more cases and the more scanner brands you receive, the more re-keying costs, and the more it is worth removing. Most offers are priced per case produced, which lines the cost up with your real activity.

For the craft laboratory handling few cases on a single scanner brand, re-keying stays bearable. The hours calculation mainly serves to set the threshold beyond which tooling will pay. As long as volume is low, the integration effort does not yet earn its keep.

The growing laboratory is the typical case. The inbound flow diversifies, dentists arrive with different cameras, and the entry queue lengthens. This is where the monthly hours turn into a half-time job in disguise. Comparing that cost with the cost of a platform settles the question quickly.

For a network of sites, re-keying is no longer only expensive: it blocks management. Without a unified flow, there is no way to know where each case stands or to guarantee traceability across the group. Centralization becomes a condition of operating, not a comfort.

FAQ

How long does re-keying a case take in a dental laboratory?

Field accounts put copying a case by hand at between 5 and 15 minutes depending on its complexity. For a routine dental case, a range of 5 to 8 minutes is realistic. That is the time it takes to read the prescription and create the production record.

How do you calculate the hours lost each month to re-keying?

Multiply your daily case count by the average entry time for one case, then by your working days. A laboratory with 30 cases a day at 6 minutes, a cautious assumption, ties up around 3 hours a day. That comes to close to 60 hours over a month of 20 working days.

Does automating re-keying really reduce errors?

Yes. Manual entry stays a recurring source of errors, enough to produce several wrong cases a month. Removing double entry removes that source: the case travels instead of being typed again, so it is no longer distorted.

Do you have to change lab management system to automate?

No. A centralization platform fits into your existing chain and pushes cases to your ERP and your CAD tools. The aim is to feed what you already use, not to replace it.

Conclusion

Manual re-keying makes noise nowhere, yet it consumes hours and manufactures errors every month. The only way to deal with it is to measure it first: put down your volume, your entry time, your hourly cost, and the figure appears. Once visible, it becomes a trade-off. Automating re-keying gives those hours back to production and closes the door on copying errors.

To estimate what re-keying costs your laboratory and remove it, try DigiLab free: 100 cases on your own work.

The Digilab team