How many labs do you use?

[jherman]

Spent time with an accounting cosultant yesterday and was shocked to find out his last practice was useing 7 or 8 lens labs.

For the practices with out a lab, how many labs bill you each month?

[Framebender]

and we still use 5 different wholesale labs and 2 different stock houses. We are in kind of a unique position where we get the maximum discount whether we order 1 or 100 jobs from a lab.

Loading everything into the database every time a new price list comes out is kind of a pain, but its allowed us to function at a consistent 22% COG including contacts.

I hope you're all having fun and making money!!

[fjpod]

We use three surface labs and two stock houses.

Oh yeah, Davis, so that makes a fourth.

[spartus]

I try very hard to use only one wholesale lab (though some orders have to go through others--I have a million lab accounts). And I use one stock lens service, since my needs for stock uncuts are fairly simple.

[Jubilee]

We utilize three all together, but one is Davis so it doesn't count ;) We have one that we use for most orders and do packages with, and another for Varilux and Contact Lens Services.

While we could chase around for the best prices, being able to do business locally with free courier services, streamlined billing..it just makes things so much easier for us and our patients.

Cassandra

[Happylady]

We mainly use two surface labs, one stock lab, and a Davis lab. We have accounts with a couple others but rarely use them.

[For-Life]

I use my Essilor lab for 99 percent of the stuff and the Hoya one for the rest. So two labs.

I also use the Essilor stock and surface uncut programs, but I tossed that in with the lab.

At one point we did deal with four, but I get everything I want from this lab, and I do keep up with what the others offer.

[High_Abbe]

I use two uncut labs, FEA Indusries and Nova Optical. FEA covers most everything that I need, but if I need a Varilux product I order through Nova. For stock lenses I use Encore Optical (very cheap), and Nassau for stock lenses.

[CME4SPECS]

2 labs, 1 stock house

[LENNY]

2 labs

2 stock houses

[Specs]

2 labs, one primarily, one back-up. The back up is nice when there is a backorder on a lens. The back up lab just might have it in stock.

[hip chic]

Two labs. One primary and one specialty.

[Bezza]

We have our own glazing facility and so order in uncuts from whoever we want, Primarily Norville UK and Essilor as between those two we can get pretty much anything and get nice deals too, but also use Zeiss, Hoya, Nikon, Rodenstock etc etc
Is nice to have the freedom to use whatever lenses we want and always means we have options when we need lenses in a hurry or something very specific

[Andrew Weiss]

Mostly we use two: one for our private-pay patients (we have a trace-and-transfer system for them), and one for our VSP patients. We also have 2 other labs we use for specialty things: one for Shamir progessives, and one for VSP-patient Rodenstock lenses. We use one stock house for our (infrequent) stock in-house edging.

[Bev Heishman]

One wholesale lab (get great stock prices and service) and Silhouette Lab for Silhouette drills.

[Snitgirl]

2 labs -

[eromitlab]

hmm... we use 4 labs (three do general surface work for us and the fourth one is Lab-Italee, where we get 2.5's, Swissflex and Kawasaki 3PFs), and one stock warehouse (nassau).