Lora and Mike in the conference room.
Behind the scenes
Behind the scenes, we are constantly working to make your experience with us a good one. Mike, our dentist, spends time after your appointment reviewing your xrays and planning your treatment as well as attending continuing education seminars. Lora, our CEO and Mike's wife, is always on the lookout for ways to improve quality and efficiency in the entire operation.
Gemba Kaizen
Gemba Kaizen is our newest method of continuous improvement. Our ongoing goal is to deliver efficient, high quality, affordable dental care to the community and Gemba Kaizen principles help us achieve this goal. Gemba means the real place where value is added for the customer and Kaizen means continuous improvement. It is basically a lean process. Implementing it is complex because it requires changes on every level of the business . . . organizational, technological and human resource issues. So the first step was gathering data . . .how long does it take us to complete a variety of tasks. Changes often require very little investment in equipment.
Continuing education
Why do we care about feet in a dental office? As you probably know, we spend at least two days each month in educating ourselves - way beyond the state regulations. A few months ago we visited a spa as a group to experience high quality customer service. The spa manager told us about their operation and then each of us enjoyed a service. Ahh!
Lora visited GE Healthcare in Waukesha to see lean manufacturing in action. Her brother-in-law, Duane Filtz, a GE engineer and project manager, gave her the tour.
We visited our crown and bridge lab, Kataoka Dental Lab, to see how they fabricate your crowns.
In the last year, we attended the Wisconsin Dental Association conference to study bonding, customer service, oral cancer, gum therapies and implant technology. We also studied gum therapies and infection control at Marquette University Dental School and we went to New York to study root canal therapies. And, of course, we attended mini-conferences with the Milwaukee chapter of the Seattle Study Club every month.
