Dental Prosthetics
We diagnosed a high-volume dental lab. Here is what we learned.
A dental lab at scale is a multi-path manufacturing operation. Physical impressions and digital scans route differently. Restorations, removables, and implant cases each follow distinct department sequences with different quality checkpoints and turnaround expectations. In the lab we diagnosed, eight workflow combinations ran simultaneously across 60 staff members and ~80 referring clinics.
The operational challenge we found was concentration of knowledge. One production manager held the routing logic, the clinic preferences, the quality standards, and the real-time status of 1,200+ active cases in her head. The lab's industry-standard software, costing $30,000 per year, couldn't model the actual complexity of how work moved through the operation.
The Operational Landscape
The operational reality in dental prosthetics
Production routing held by one person
Assignment logic across technicians, case types, and workflow paths was held entirely by a senior manager. Her criteria worked. They had simply never been captured in a system.
Case visibility ends at intake
After intake, a case's status was visible only to the technician holding it and the manager tracking everything mentally. Clinic calls about case status required finding someone on the production floor.
Blocked cases invisible until they're late
Cases waiting on missing information, an unclear margin, a missing shade, sat without formal tracking. Follow-up depended on individual memory. Late cases were the symptom; missing blockers were the cause.
Quality dependent on who inspects
When the production manager inspected, consistency was exceptional. When she wasn't available, the criteria lived nowhere the team could reference. Quality became a function of presence, not process.
What We Build
Purpose-built software for dental prosthetics
Production-wide case visibility
Every person in the operation sees where every case stands in real time. Approaching deadlines and at-risk cases surface automatically. No one has to track someone down on the floor to answer a clinic's question.
Intelligent case routing
The system generates the correct department sequence the moment a case is created based on restoration type, input method, and clinic preferences. Eight workflow combinations, routed automatically.
Prescription intelligence
Claude's vision model reads handwritten and scanned prescriptions, extracting structured fields with confidence scoring. High-confidence extractions are accepted automatically; ambiguous fields route to human review. The 10% of prescriptions that cause 90% of remakes get caught at intake, not at the bench.
Adaptive quality control
Documented benchmarks by case type and clinic preference, enforced as workflow gates. The system tracks which quality dimensions each technician needs support on and highlights those dimensions on future cases. Inspection becomes consistent regardless of who performs it.
Blocker tracking and resolution
Every case awaiting information carries a defined status, a follow-up threshold, and a documented trail. Issues surface at intake and during production, not after a deadline has passed.
Operational assistant
A Claude-powered assistant available at every workstation with full context of the lab's configuration, workflows, and live case data. New staff resolve procedural questions without interrupting the production manager.
How We Engage
Our approach to dental prosthetics
We completed a full diagnostic and platform design for a dental lab processing 1,600 cases per month with 60 staff. That engagement mapped eight workflow combinations, traced $440,000-$770,000 in annual operational exposure to specific root causes, and designed a platform architecture to address each one. Every dental engagement we take builds on that foundation.
Step 1
Diagnostic
We map operations, quantify impact, and identify the root causes that matter most to the business.
Step 2
Design
We design a platform architecture that addresses each root cause in priority order, scoped to what the operation actually needs.
Step 3
Build
We build, deploy, and transition the platform with a rollout plan designed to protect the operation throughout the switch.
Related Insights
Let's discuss your operations
Tell us about your dental prosthetics operation. We'll tell you what's possible.
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