Mark, when you say that 5% is your cutoff, what exactly do you do at that point? I am dealing with one account with a 10% as opposed to my average 1 to 1.5% with all the rest.
What is your profit margin?
If it's 5%, you do 19 units at NO PROFIT to pay for ONE remake! I have, over the 31 years I've been in business grown comfortable with the fact that we CANNOT expect to have less than about 3% remakes. I build 5% into my operating and production budgets, and if a dentist or lab client is running more than 5% he goes on "double secret probation" and we watch them like a hawk and document everything.
Depending on the size of the account and their product mix, we will make every effort to rehabilitate them, and if that doesn't work, we refer them out to either one of the local labs or mail order labs we know and wish them well.
If we have a particular product that has more than 5% remakes, we put that PRODUCT on probabtion and call in the manufacturer, we take a serious look at our protocol, and we decide if we should just drop that product off our menu.
Apnea devices were the last product to get the ax.