Planning around case duration.
Most scheduling difficulty is not about how quickly a laboratory works. It is about booking against an assumption instead of a confirmed date.
What determines how long a case takes
Fabrication time varies with what is being made. A single monolithic unit involves fewer stages than a layered anterior restoration, which is fired and assessed repeatedly. A multi-unit framework may be verified before veneering. An implant case may wait on components being ordered.
Furnace cycles, curing, setting and cooling are fixed by the materials and cannot be compressed by working harder. Slow cooling on zirconia-supported ceramic exists for a specific reason — a thick veneer cooled quickly retains residual stress that surfaces months later as a chip.
Stages that return the case to the practice mid-course — a framework try-in, a bite verification, a set-up try-in — add time deliberately and for good reason.
Queries are the largest variable
A case that needs a decision from the practice stops until that decision arrives. If a query is raised on a Friday and answered the following Wednesday, the case has lost most of a week regardless of how quickly anyone worked.
This is why the prescription matters so much to scheduling. A case carrying material, shade with the guide named, margin type, antagonist and any constraint proceeds without interruption.
It is also why a reachable contact is a scheduling tool. The practices whose cases run most predictably are usually the ones we can get an answer from within the hour.
Book against a confirmed date
The commonest scheduling failure is booking the seat appointment at the impression appointment, based on an assumption, and then discovering the assumption was wrong.
Book provisionally and confirm once the laboratory has acknowledged the case and given a date. That is a small change to front-desk workflow and it anchors the appointment to something real.
Where a date genuinely cannot move — a patient travelling, treatment being seated alongside other work — say so when the case is sent rather than afterwards. A constraint known at the start can usually be planned around.
Urgency inflation
If every case is marked urgent, none of them are, and the laboratory loses the ability to prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
Reserve it for cases where the date is clinically or personally fixed, and say why. A crown for a patient emigrating next week is a different situation from one for a patient who would prefer not to wait.
Practices that use urgency sparingly find it works when they need it.
The provisional is often the real constraint
How long a case can safely take is frequently determined not by the laboratory but by how long the provisional will hold.
A well-made, well-fitting provisional with maintained contacts and a sealed margin is stable for a considerable period. A hastily made one debonds, wears through, allows drift, irritates tissue, and turns a routine case into an emergency.
If a case is likely to run longer — a complex design, a component to order, a verification stage — invest accordingly in the provisional.
What the market generally publishes
Laboratories that publish schedules usually do so by product category — a single monolithic unit differs from a layered anterior restoration, and both differ from a case with a framework try-in or a removable prosthesis moving through several stages.
Most also distinguish between working days in the laboratory and elapsed days including transit, which are materially different figures for a practice outside the immediate area.
Both distinctions are worth having in mind when comparing one laboratory's stated schedule with another's, because they are frequently not measuring the same thing.
Fairmont's schedule
The schedule that applies to your practice depends on your case mix, your delivery pattern and whether staged work is involved, so it is given directly rather than as a general figure.
Call the laboratory and we will set out what to expect by category, and what we would need from you to hold it. Booking the seat appointment against a confirmed date rather than an assumed one is what makes any schedule work.
What each side controls
The laboratory controls fabrication, how promptly queries are raised, and whether it commits to dates it can meet. The practice controls the completeness of the prescription, the speed of answering, the quality of the provisional, and whether the appointment was booked against a real date.
A practice that supplies complete cases and answers promptly experiences a materially more predictable service than one that does not, from exactly the same laboratory.
For the current schedule that applies to your practice and case type, call the laboratory.
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Digital scans and conventional impressions are both accepted. Cases move by UPS and Purolator, and Fairmont works with practices throughout British Columbia and across Canada.