Customer
Glidewell Dental
Headquarters
Newport Beach, CA
Industry
Dental
Employees
2k+
Dental labs everywhere understand the challenge: as demand grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to scale operations without compromising somewhere.
“We strive to provide the best treatment planning for our doctors with all types of surgical guides, but as our department started to grow, it became a real challenge to deliver on both speed and capacity, without compromising on quality,” says Ilan Sapir, the manager of digital treatment planning for Glidewell Dental. “Our main issue was inconsistency in printed surface results and fitting parts in assembly. We had lots of printing failures overnight, and we had to have long post-processing to get to the final result. This created a lot of backlogs.”
For the world’s largest manufacturer of custom dental implants with a reputation for excellence, anything less than the best wouldn’t cut it. That’s when they turned to the J3 DentaJet.
Glidewell has become well known in the industry for precision planning for implant positioning, and high-end fabrication of surgical guides like tissue supports, bone supports, and stackable surgical guides with immediate loaded provisional for the day of surgery.
While Sapir was able to leverage his more than 15 years of skillful dental manufacturing experience to deliver high-quality parts, he often had to be very hands on to compensate for the print technology they relied on.
“With other technologies, we had to run the machine overnight and pray to have good results in the morning,” says Sapir. “Some of our printers were unstable and forced us to deal with print failures and accuracy issues, causing delays and forcing us to remake models.”
And not only that—the process for printing and for post-processing was lengthy and labor intensive.
“Every job used to take around 10 hours,” says Sapir.
“Overnight, we can triple, and sometimes even quadruple our capacity—with no delays or backlogs because the accuracy is so good,” says Sapir.
The J3 DentaJet—which leverages PolyJet technology to simultaneously print multi-material applications with mixed trays of up to three materials—is a “game changer” when it comes to capacity, accuracy, and ease of use, says Sapir.
In the Glidewell lab, the team relies on the J3 DentaJet to produce surgical guides used for bone support, tissue support, and bone reductions—with quality, speed, and consistency as a given.
“Thanks to the accuracy of the printed parts, we can run the machine two or three times a day,” says Sapir. “Our capacity went from peaking at 40 surgical guides in 10 hours with 2 machines, to peaking at 100 surgical guides in 8 hours, with only one machine.”
“The speed of processing is so much faster than other technologies that we’ve tried,” says Sapir.
Once a print job is complete, the parts are able to be scraped from the build tray, and the support structure is washed off using a waterjet. There are no additional post processing steps required.
There is also no support scarring or decline in accuracy on downward facing surfaces, which is prevalent with other types of 3D printing technology, explains Sapir.
“When you’re printing stackable guides or bone reduction guides with special connections, you need the sides of the model to come out perfectly flat. With the J3 DentaJet, we have zero adjustments when the guides come out of the machine or while washing them,” says Sapir. “And because there’s no delay, I can print every model that I want and ship it the same day.”
Not only do parts seat perfectly on models, but the metal sleeves fit much better than they did using legacy technology. And GrabCad software makes nesting and print management seamless and simple.
“We don’t spend any time on nesting,” says Sapir. “We drop parts onto the tray, fix any errors in the files with one click, and choose the strategy. Two minutes later, we load the job onto the tray and walk away.”
“We can now fabricate new types of surgical guides, and we don’t need to worry about accuracy,” says Sapir. “It brings new possibilities to the dental field.”
