Case Study: Smile Brands
Dental support organization gains an automated system of record to manage nationwide locations and reduce spend.
ServiceChannel
Highlights
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ESTABLISHED A CROSS-FUNCTIONAL SYSTEM OF RECORD for the facilities management team, used by operations, real estate, and finance leadership.
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AUTOMATED WORK ORDER PROCESSES AND COMMUNICATIONS to help office staff manage issues quickly and effectively.
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REDUCED COSTS through service provider and trade spend management.
Quantifiable Results
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of service provider spend with vendors sourced through ServiceChannel's Provider Search.
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in savings from deferred work orders sent to building owners.
“When we implemented ServiceChannel, it really became the singular platform for us to deliver a better experience for the offices we support.“
Scott Graversen
Director of Facilities and Dental Equipment
Background
Smile Brands, one of the largest providers of dental support services in the U.S., provides support to oral healthcare providers at more than 600 locations across 29 states. Focused on a mission of delivering Smiles For Everyone!®, Director of Facilities and Dental Equipment, Scott Graversen, is consistently pursuing business process excellence so that oral healthcare providers and their teams have more time to focus on providing great care to their patients.
Challenge
With over 600 offices and 23,000 work orders to support annually, the Smile Brands team didn’t have an efficient way to track work orders and manage service providers in the field. Overseeing this work was labor intensive, done through a patched-together system of emails, intranet ticketing, and phone calls. There was no single point of reference or formal processes in place to resolve work orders promptly or cost-effectively.
- Bandwidth limitations— 5 facilities managers spread across the country, supporting over 600 offices and 23,000 work orders annually
- No system of record to track all work orders and communications
- Limited visibility into vendor performance and delays in invoicing
“We went from a system of being very human-dependent to an automated solution that delivers faster service to our offices and better communications to our vendors.”
Scott Graversen
Director of Facilities and Dental Equipment
Solution
By implementing the ServiceChannel platform as the single system of record, the Smile Brands teams now operate as one—using standardized automated processes and analytics dashboards to seamlessly communicate and work cross-functionally with leadership, internal teams, and service providers. “There is so much more engagement across multiple teams as everyone can now ‘see’ what is going on in ServiceChannel,” says Scott.
In addition to gaining operational efficiencies, the Smile Brands teams now also have a way to source new, high-performing service providers through ServiceChannel’s Provider Search. Once they start working with these providers, they can track, interact, and manage payments with them through the ServiceChannel platform. Scott also emphasized the importance of ServiceChannel Analytics in their program. “The analytics tools allow us to really manage our vendors and our spend by trade very efficiently…to get that kind of information was very manual [before]…now we can run those reports at our fingertips through the ServiceChannel analytics programs.”
Results
With a central source of truth for facilities workflows, the Smile Brands facilities team can act faster and communicate more efficiently with every team. Operations leadership is able to leverage ServiceChannel analytics to assess program priorities and benchmark their facilities spend in their market. And those serving patients in the dental offices can get back to fulfilling the Smile Brands brand promise of delivering Smiles for Everyone.
Smile Brands has also been able to achieve significant cost savings. One way the platform has enabled this is by allowing them to defer work orders for facility repairs like HVAC or roofing directly to a building’s landlord, who should be responsible for those repairs. “We are tracking to defer over $80,000 of work orders to our landlords this year that we would have performed and paid for ourselves. That alone was a huge win,” says Scott.
- Realized over $80,000 in savings by deferring work orders to landlords.
- Saved several thousands of hours annually through process automation.
- Improved service provider performance by leveraging providers through Provider Search.
