Signature Dental Partners Keeps Supply Spend Under 5% at 100 Locations

Signature Dental Partners was no newcomer to the dental procurement software space. Before Method, Signature tried three other procurement platforms.

The first was a startup that had a lot of promise but was too early-stage to keep pace with a growing DSO such as Signature Dental. The second was another platform in the space, which also wasn’t a good fit. The third was a general procurement platform not built for dental, closer to an office supply tool than a clinical ordering system. Signature used that one for about a year and a half before the limitations became too hard to work around, primarily in month-to-month execution. As the procurement leader at Signature, Darlene was stuck entering new products manually. This meant going through the list and adding them one at a time as offices requested. On a busy day, that meant spending hours adding products manually before she could even get to the actual work of reviewing and approving orders.

"I'm not kidding you when I say I probably manually added 50 products a day, every day, if not more," Darlene said.

So what made Method different than the other three options? Supplier catalogs were already built in. When a product existed in a supplier's catalog, it was similarly available in Method. No more manual entry or daily backlog. Practices could submit their purchase orders, and Darlene could easily review and approve them. 

That single difference enabled Darlene to approve orders quickly and efficiently.

Practices join Signature to get the back-office support, HR, accounting, and payroll, without giving up how they run their clinical operations. From a supply standpoint, that means dentists can use the composites, bonding agents, and materials they've trusted for years. And Signature, by design, doesn't mandate otherwise.

That makes procurement nuanced and hard to manage from a spend perspective. 

Signature has a formulary within Method, a list of preferred, cost-effective products they'd like practices to order from. But offices still have access to everything in the platform. Method has 800,000+ dental products, enabling dentists and their staff to choose the products they prefer, while also enabling DSOs to showcase their negotiated rates on their preferred products. If a hygienist wants a specific brand of prophy paste, she can order it. If a dentist won't switch from the desensitizer they've used for 20 years, that’s okay. They don’t have to.

Darlene, meanwhile, can see all of the orders and take action before an order goes out, versus seeing it reflected in a budget line item. If there are supplies in a given order that the team doesn’t have a preference for, she can switch them out for the lower-priced alternatives. 

Formulary compliance is tracked by spend percentage. That gives leadership a view of how much of each location's purchasing is hitting the preferred products, and where there's room to improve. Darlene's target is 50% compliance per order, and she works toward it order by order. They want each practice to have access to their negotiated prices and get the best deals available while also encouraging autonomy to operate as the practice always has. 

"We're not going to tell them ‘you can't use the composite you've used for 20 years’," she said. "But we can show them where they're spending more than they need to."

Method helps Signature Dental Partners catch the discrepancies that would otherwise go unnoticed until they show up on a spend report.

One of the most consistent examples is being able to compare prices on supplies. Signature has three primary general supply vendors in Method: Henry Schein, Darby, and Benco. When a practice builds an order, they can run a cost analysis that automatically selects the lowest-priced option across all three for each product. The savings aren't always dramatic on any single item, but they add up fast across 100 locations.

Darlene ran a cost analysis on one order where an office had manually selected products from a single vendor. The same products, sourced optimally across suppliers, came in at $400 less.

They’ve seen this pattern time and again. When offices skip the cost analysis step, they will almost always default to a preferred vendor out of habit.

The same visibility applies to order quantities. Darlene can see a full history of what each location has ordered and when right within her Method analytics and reporting. When something looks off, say, an office requesting 10 jars of topical anesthetic on an urgent order, she can look back and see they typically order two or three every few months. With this information, Darlene can investigate and determine if that 10-jar order is necessary. 

If the order is unnecessary, Darlene can adjust the quantity and keep the order moving so the practice gets the remainder of its supplies when they need it.

The DSO industry generally treats 5% of production as the benchmark for supply spend. This is one of the primary metrics that Signature Dental Partners uses to see if their practices are overspending on supplies. While using Method, they’ve been able to stay below 5% consistently across 100 locations.

That number didn't come from a single initiative or a dramatic turnaround. They put in the work building the right infrastructure, using a platform that could actually handle dental supply ordering, and establishing a structured process to keep ordering predictable. Now, they have the visibility they need that lets one person catch the purchase order mistakes that would otherwise go unnoticed across a hundred locations.