How Today's Dental Network Reduced Supply Spend by 25%—And They’re Just Getting Started

For TDN, supply spend had been sitting at 7% of production. This was above where Chris Jenkins and the rest of the leadership team believed it should be. This was a clear opportunity to improve the supply spend and management processes that other dental practices were implementing.

“I knew the industry average should put us around 5%, if not lower,” Chris said.

The first step to decrease supply spend was to understand what supplies were being purchased and from which suppliers.

Then, they needed a platform to help manage and control the purchasing process, as it was far beyond what a person or even a team could manage.

Before TDN could fix their supply spend, they needed to understand what it consisted of. What they found was that they had 1,300 vendors and 7,200 different products spread across 38 locations.

“[At that scale] there's no good way to manage that,” Chris said. “Trying to analyze that [amount of information] would be impossible.”

With this in mind, Chris turned to the market to secure better supply rates for his practices. Today's Dental Network ran a formal RFP across their top five suppliers, sharing 18 months of purchase history and asking each supplier to show what they could offer at what price. The goal was to decrease the amount of money their practices were paying for supplies while ensuring the same great quality.

Through this process, TDN found a different supplier that could cover the broadest selection of products for them at the best rates. With these negotiated rates in hand, TDN established an 80% purchasing requirement through their preferred supplier for all non-implant supplies, giving them a single primary relationship, consolidated pricing, and a foundation to start managing spend in a meaningful way.

This didn't mean that practices couldn't order from other vendors; in fact, TDN still enables their practices to order through 44 approved suppliers. It just means that a majority of supplies have to be bought from their preferred suppliers.

With this newly established supplier and other approved suppliers, TDN needed a platform that could put those negotiated rates to work and make sure practices were actually using them.

“I wanted to see if we moved to a new supplier, what does this look like implementing our entire price structure through our current system or through Method,” Chris said.

Method won on two fronts. First, it could manage the entire procurement process: ordering, approvals, price comparison, and compliance all in one place. Second, and perhaps more importantly to Chris, was the customer success relationship that came with it.

TDN had been using another platform before. The reporting they needed wasn't there, and when they asked for help building it, the support wasn't there either. By contrast, Method's approach was different from day one. With weekly touchpoints from their customer success team and direct engagement with office managers, the TDN team felt they had Method working right alongside them, invested in making sure these new processes actually stuck.

“We meet every week with Method's team, and I think that's been so beneficial,” Chris said. “They're so engaged with our offices to make sure we're doing the right thing. That's the partner I wanted.”

Even nine months in, those weekly sessions are still happening. When an office manager wants to add a new vendor, Method's team researches whether a comparable product already exists in the system before anything gets added. This way, the catalog is managed, and the ordering process remains relatively simple.

One of the first initiatives TDN ran through Method was a physical inventory audit across all 38 locations, something the organization had never done before.

TDN found they had been carrying approximately $500,000 in monthly supply spend on the books and estimating roughly 30 days of inventory on hand. Method helped TDN implement a scanning process across every practice to find out what was actually there.

The number was an astounding $3.8 million.

As he thought through how they got to that point, Chris believed it was because, “Everybody just kept ordering and ordering and ordering and never using it.”

Instead of being treated as a setback, the team instead viewed it as exactly the kind of visibility TDN needed to build a better inventory process.

As of August 2026, their new inventory control program has been rolled out across all locations through Method, giving every practice the structure to order what they need rather than what they've always ordered.

The goal is to enable practices with the tools they need to succeed. Helping a practice within their network maximize their profit margin so they keep the money they worked for instead of overspending a portion of it on supplies. This is a goal that TDN wants to achieve for all of its practices.

The next phase to decrease overspending is formulary development. Once the formulary is in place, Chris expects supply spend to move from 5.2% toward his 4.5% target and even lower.

Today's Dental Network went from 7% supply spend to 5.2% by making three strategic moves in sequence: better vendor rates, a tool to manage purchasing behavior, and the discipline to track compliance at the location level. They have weekly customer success touchpoints with Method, ensuring ongoing compliance and adoption among practices. They're also working towards 80% of their supplies being purchased from their primary preferred supplier. They've built an ecosystem that enables their practices to have what they need when they need it, without overspending for it. Enabling practices to keep more of the money they worked for.

Not only does Method have the functionality TDN was looking for, but they're acting as a partner for the TDN team.