Remakes: the cost your lab is absorbing quietly
A remake costs the material, the bench time, the delivery and the relationship. Most labs cannot say what their remake rate is, which is why it stays where it is.
Product·28 August 2026·6 min read
Ask a lab owner what their remake rate is and you usually get a feeling rather than a figure. High this month. Bad with that one clinic. It is one of the largest controllable costs in the business and one of the least measured.
The reason is simple. Remakes are recorded, if at all, as a new case, so they disappear into the same production numbers as new work.
Record a remake as a remake
The first step costs nothing: flag it, link it to the original case, and record a cause from a short fixed list. Impression or scan inadequate, margin not readable, bite registration wrong, shade mismatch, fit issue, fracture, wrong specification, clinic changed the plan.
A fixed list matters. Free text causes cannot be counted, and anything that cannot be counted will not be improved.
Split lab caused from clinic caused, honestly
Both matter and they need different responses. Lab caused remakes are a process problem: a checkpoint that is missing, a technician who needs support, a material behaving differently.
Clinic caused remakes are a relationship problem. The right response is a factual conversation with evidence, not silent absorption. A dentist whose impressions cause four remakes a month usually does not know, because nobody has ever shown them a pattern.
Checkpoints beat inspection at the end
- Check the input on arrival, before the case enters production. Most expensive remakes were doomed on day one.
- Check at the die and margin stage, where a problem is cheap to fix.
- Check before finishing, when correction still costs minutes rather than a case.
- Photograph the case at dispatch. It ends most disputes about what left the lab.
Use the data with clinics, carefully
The goal is fewer remakes, not winning an argument. Bring the pattern, not a single case: here are the cases from the last quarter, here is what we received, here is what happened.
Most dentists respond well to this, especially if you offer something practical, such as a short note on what your technicians need from an impression for that work type. The ones who do not respond are telling you something useful about the account's real profitability.
Price the true cost once
Work out what a remake actually costs you: material, technician hours at each stage, delivery both ways, and the case you could not take because the bench was busy. Most labs are surprised, and the number changes how seriously the whole organisation treats input quality.
DLMS tracks cases through their stages with technician assignment and a full case history, so a remake can be linked to its original, given a cause, and reported by clinic and by work type instead of vanishing into the day's production.
You cannot reduce what you do not count. Flag every remake, record why, split it by cause, and have the conversations the data points at. The rate falls because the causes become visible, not because anyone tries harder.
Frequently asked questions
What is a normal remake rate for a dental lab?
It varies enormously by work type and by the clinics a lab serves, which is exactly why comparing yourself to an industry number is less useful than comparing yourself to last quarter. What matters is that you measure it consistently, split it by cause and by clinic, and watch the trend.
How do you handle remakes caused by the clinic?
Record them the same way, with the evidence, and charge according to a policy agreed in advance rather than negotiated case by case. Labs that absorb every clinic caused remake silently end up subsidising the clinics with the worst impressions, and those clinics never find out there is a problem.
Does digital scanning reduce remakes?
It removes a whole category of impression problems, which helps, and it introduces new ones around scan quality and margin capture. The gain is real but it is not automatic, and it makes recording the cause of each remake more useful, not less.