Contact Lenses

Manage Your Contact Lens Inventory for Profitability

By Gregory D. Foley, OD, FAAO

Gathering centralized stocking and dispensing data allows you to manage your contact lens inventory to meet patient needs while minimizing costly overstocking. Apply data to formulate a plan to purchase products with proven ROI, then train your staff to sell properly and make patient re-ordering easy.

Gregory D. Foley, OD, FAAO

Eye Central, PC

Washington, DC; andMcLean,Va.

ODs: 2 full-time and 1 part-time

Exams: More than9,000 comprehensive exams annually;60 percent of comprehensive exams includecontact lens fitting and refitting.

Annual Revenues:> $2 million

www.eyecentral.net

Contact lens fitting and dispensing can be a profitable specialty–provided you get the right mix of contact lens brands and powers, and limit overstocks. You can achieve this by centralizing data on your contact lens inventory purchases and sales and conducting an analysis on which mixes of brands and powers deliver the greatest return on your investment.

Here are the steps we’ve taken to manage this essential practice investment.

Analyze

Help Centralizing and Analyzing Data

Managing your contact lens inventory is hard if you don’t know exactly what you purchased, how much, at what price and how much of it sold and at what price it sold. As a busy OD and practice leader, it is hard to aggregate all that data. One way to simplify this task is to use a company like ABB CONCISE, which enables us to buy from one central source that keeps data on all our purchases while also tracking our office’s contact lens buying trends. Our ABB CONCISE rep merges the data from all of the manufacturers’ products we purchase through them in a report called the Business Review. I use that data to invest only in the brands that we prescribe most often and to receive best pricing on inventory purchases. We purchase banks of specialty contact lenses like torics and multifocals immediately available for us to order at the best price, but we found that it was not profitable enough to warrant keeping such contact lenses in stock.

The 1850 storefront of Eye Central on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

Purchase

As a result of this data analysis we received from the Business Review, we now only keep in stock two brands of contact lenses, but at powers from -0.50D up to -6.00D, as we found it gives us an edge over corporate optometrists to have such a wide range of powers at our fingertips. if you can dispense from the stock and capture that annual supply sale, then there is no need for that patient to go out wasting their time shopping for the best price.

Use Reps to Keep Inventory in Order

Every two weeks our contact lens vendor reps visit our office to check our sample inventory. It is to their benefit to ensure that we have the samples we need to fit their product, so they are happy to do this for us.It is easy for contact lens samples to get depleted or disorganized in a busy office, so having your reps visit regularly to check your sample supplies is important. Editor’s Note: If the reps don’t do this, you have to pay your staff to do this.

Train to Sell

Use Reps to Educate Technicians on New Inventory

In addition to having the right mix of brands and powers and samples that are up-to-date, your inventory management isn’t complete until your staff understands how to move that inventory. To sell the inventory, they must understand it, which is where the vendor reps come in. Every six months I have our reps explain their brands’ newest products, including the advantages of each contact lens. Our ABB CONCISE rep also explains to staff how rebates for buying annual supplies work, so that staff, in turn, can fully explain to patients the cost savings on an annual supply. Using ABB CONCISE’s Price Monitor helps us show patients our contact lenses are competitively priced with online retailers.

Make Patient Re-Ordering Easy

Enable Ordering from Your Web Site

Inventory management starts in your office, but today it needs to also extend online. We use ABB CONCISE’s yourlens.com to allow our patients to order contact lenses directly from our web site. We placed an “ORDER CONTACTS” button prominently on our home page. When patients click that, they are taken to an online ordering page operated by ABB CONCISE, but which is branded and styled to look like any other page of our web site (so patients don’t know they have technically left our site to order). We discount contact lenses purchased from our site by about 10 percent to give patients an incentive to order online rather than through our office, as it costs us nostaff time for them to order online. At the end of every month we receive a check from ABB CONCISE for the contact lenses our patients purchased.

Show Patients How to Purchase Online

Since it is more economical for us to have patients order online, I always mention the online ordering option to contact lens patients before handing them off to our optical. Our optical then also reminds patients of this option as they check out. In addition, we have a poster in our reception area informing patients of the features of our site, which we revamped in 2010. Among the highlighted capabilities of the site is the ability to reorder contact lenses online.

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Gregory D. Foley, OD, FAAO, isowner ofEye Central, PC, inWashington DC and McLean, Va.To contact him: gdfdoc@me.com

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