Ship Date Automation: Setting Turnaround Times for your Lab

If you go to Configure>Ship Date Automation (shown below), you can enter in a number for "Days in Lab" so that your Practices will not be able to request cases before a certain date. These are business days. Some Labs will change this Days in Lab number multiple times a day to manage the number of cases that they have due by a certain date, etc. 

Ship Date Automation works by adding "Days in Lab" + "Transit Time" for Total Days to allow before the case arrives at the Ship To Location specified in the Rx. 

For example, if Days In Lab = 10, Transit Time = 2, then the Total Days = 12.  When creating an Rx, the minimum a Practice can request a case is 12 business days from today. Also, any marked Holidays are skipped. For example, if the lab is closed Labor Day, a Monday, Monday does not count toward the 12 days. 

Another example is that you want cases to Dr. X's location halfway across the country to have some extra time to get there, you would pad on an extra 2 days to their Transit Time, increasing their Transit Time from 2 to 4 days, in addition to the base Days in Lab duration, resulting in 4 Transit Time days + 10 Days in Lab = 14 days.  

So for this Dr. X you would always give yourself 14 full days for the case to get to their office from the date the case was submitted to your Lab.