Sowingo: promoting innovations in dental office inventory management

ABSTRACT

Unhappy with erroneous and inefficient inventory management affecting his dental practice, Dr. Bhatti, a seasoned dentist, founded Sowingo in 2012 to create a solution tailor-made for busy health practitioners. Since then, the company enjoyed a few years’ unfettered monopoly and grew to have six employees with over a 100 clients under its belt. Despite offering an innovative inventory management system in the market, however, Sowingo is challenged to continue its growth, as potential clients are unwilling to forego the error-prone and manual way of managing inventory. What will be the next strategic direction for Sowingo?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Teaching note

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Notes

¹ Henry Schein, Inc. is a Fortune 500 company and a global distributor of health care dental, animal health, and medical products (Henry Schein, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ontario Centres of Excellence under Grant #26757.

Notes on contributors

ShiKui Wu

ShiKui Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Business Administration at Lakehead University. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Management Information Systems from Concordia University. His research interests include e-commerce, design science research, business innovations and supply chain management. His work has been funded by the Canadian federal and provincial government agencies. His research has been published in Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, and Journal of Business Research. His work has also been presented at prestigious international conferences. He wrote a book on data-driven approach in designing and implementing e-negotiation systems, and received a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on multi-attribute auction models and systems.

Linying Dong

Linying Dong is an Associate Professor in Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management at Ryerson University. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Management Information Systems from University of Western Ontario. She has been actively engaged in teaching, research, and services for the Ryerson community, developed and taught courses at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels, been awarded the Provost Teaching Award as well as internal and external fundings. She has published in top tier IS journals including EJIS, JIT, ISJ, and teaching cases in Journal of IT Teaching Cases and Ivey Publishing.

Stephanie Soussamian

Stephanie Soussamian is a Project Manager at CEGEP - John Abbott College and a Managing Partner at North Ridge Associates. She holds a MBA degree from Ryerson University and a M.Eng degree from Concordia University. She also holds the Project Manager Professional and Certificate of Information Management credentials. She has been working on large projects as project manager, coordinator and field engineer, including the projects across multiple Kiewit business units and the CEGEP - John Abbott College. She also taught courses in project management at the Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University.