The fast-paced finishing team, completing up to 3,500-4,000 orders daily, relies on Rx-Universe for efficiency. Photos courtesy of Matthew Morrison.
Sponsored Content
Data and automation bring efficiencies to lab performance in big and small settings
By Matthew Morrison
Dec. 8, 2025
There’s never a slow day at the Delta Ophthalmic Lab and Distribution Center. The lab runs 24 hours Monday through Friday. It’s powered by 250 team members charged with the manufacturing of 3,500 to 4,000 custom pairs of eyewear, which are shipped daily to our 400 Canadian locations.
With one of the most automated labs in North America, we’ve adopted a mantra to focus on continuous improvement and growth, understanding that change doesn’t happen overnight. We want our processes to be reliable and repeatable. That’s led us to embrace new manufacturing ideas, methodologies and technologies, such as AI, to enhance workflow routines, remove manual or redundant steps and ensure our team members are engaged in their daily tasks while maintaining costs by becoming more efficient.
Our team is regularly analyzing our data collection on a daily and sometimes hourly basis when it comes to monitoring our quality, shipping and production. If an error occurs, it can be detrimental to our line of production if we don’t catch it right away. It’s essential for us to run an optical lab management software system that can keep up with our pace of our environment and ensure that we are creating the best experience for our clinics and patients.
AN ADAPTIVE, RESPONSIVE SYSTEM AND TEAM
Based on our reporting needs and required access to data, we would commonly run into issues with our old lab management system. We were balancing the need to run production or pause manufacturing to replicate data overnight. This limited the hours we could operate daily. As our volume grew—from serving 30 clinics in 2008 to 400 today—we needed a stable, reliable system that could keep our lab running without interruption, scale to our business needs and provide a partnership that cared about the real-world production issues and support in the creation of solutions.
We upgraded to Rx-Universe at the end of 2021. Its team is very responsive to suggestions and improvements, recognizing that the challenges we encounter are often shared across many labs. Because of that, they’re committed to developing solutions that also benefit the wider industry. I’ve worked closely with them on the co-development of many updates that have added great value to our business and their platform.
One thing I appreciate most is how receptive the company is when we have feedback. I appreciate that collaboration. There’s a willingness to grow and improve, just like our mantra here. If we can benefit from these updates, other labs can, too.
EFFICIENT SYSTEMS AND DATA TRACKING BRING IMPROVEMENTS
The Rx-Universe software addressed many issues we faced. The highest value, in my opinion, is the ability to extract data on an hourly basis to make quick decisions throughout the day to fix issues.
Quality control underway of anti-reflective AR coatings. 95% of lenses processed here have AR, including anti-fog, driving, mirrors and blue-light filtering.
We’ve seen several improvements in our key performance indicator metrics across the business since implementing Rx-Universe and improving our access to data. When we started in 2022, our defective rate from our internal lab breakage perspective was around 7%. So far this year, we are at 5%—a significant improvement. Many factors come into play, but the reliability of data and the ability to make small changes that make processes more repeatable are key.
Our labor efficiency rate, how many jobs we ship vs. how many people are in the building, has improved. In 2025, we are tracking 14.6% more in efficiency than we were when we initially transitioned to Rx-Universe. This means we are able to do more work with the same headcount, which is important and allows us to continue manufacturing the majority of our products from our Delta facility, in lieu of offshoring volume. We can grow and be more scalable with the people we have.
Here are a few examples of functionalities in the Rx-Universe software that helped us reach these greater efficiencies.
CUSTOMIZABLE DATAVIEW OF LAB PERFORMANCE
All orders that enter our lab are custom and consist of many different order types and prescriptions. Our goal as a lab is to understand the makeup, or challenge, of an order to determine the best option to fulfill successfully. Can we make something easier by removing a step of sorts or moving a challenging job to a technical resource to solve before heading to the floor? Rx-Universe’s routing systems allow us to set complex rules and filter jobs to the correct location or people to optimize and remove delays from the manufacturing of an order. This also provides a much greener option for our team, as we are only printing orders when they are needed.
The view for our lab team has been fine-tuned, as well. Controlling what’s visible on the work ticket improves our workflow management and allows us to highlight things we believe are important for our teams to know. It’s more visual, and it’s easier to make decisions and make processes consistent. For example, orders from new clinics are highlighted differently to help with onboarding as they transition to a new lab. The team knows that those orders go through a different process. If they notice there are challenges, they can provide feedback on how we can help.
ENHANCED WORK WITH THIRD-PARTY SUPPLIERS
We rely heavily on automation and leverage technology to standardize processes. Progressive work entering our facility from partner labs often introduced many manual steps for us, as we did not have the compensated information needed to run our automation in our finishing department. By integrating Rx-Universe with some suppliers, we were able to leverage our normal daily processes, adding consistency to our finishing process. Knowing the compensated information in Rx-Universe also allowed us to better track outside breakages and quality issues, allowing us to monitor the quality of these outside jobs more efficiently and provide feedback.
Leveraging their integration with VisionWeb, we are able to seamlessly send orders to third-party labs, limiting the need for manual reentry, which was very timely and led to many recurring entry errors.
Request a Demo of Rx-Universe
INTEGRATED DIGITAL TRACKING
We’re also excited that Rx-Universe is beginning to partner with vendors that offer a digital work ticket or e-ticket system, using RFID tags to track our workflow. This will be an upcoming pilot program, which we envision will further reduce our printing and paper use.
SMALL WINS
Simple things that have been added over the years, like non-case-sensitive searches, leveraging UPC codes for trace attachments and increasing the amount of PDF prints you can complete during an invoicing session. This shows a willingness to improve even the smallest functions.
TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR SUCCESS
Access to data is a very important starting point for understanding and improving your business. Having a company that understands your demands and needs is essential. Rx-Universe helps us understand all the details, so we can streamline processes or remove processes or steps when necessary.
Read more about software solutions.
 |
Matthew Morrison is the Senior Director, Manufacturing and Fulfillment, at the Delta Ophthalmic Lab and Distribution Center in British Columbia and has 18 years in supply chain management across manufacturing and distribution sectors. Morrison has played a pivotal role in leading and supporting major initiatives such as ERP system implementations, facility relocations and the development of a strong coaching and mentoring culture that drives performance. To contact him: Matthew.Morrison@fyidoctors.com |
