Unrivaled Experience: How Glidewell’s Industry Intelligence Guarantees Your Success

If you were to tour almost any dental lab in the U.S. today, you’d find digital tools being used in production. At a minimum, computer-aided design and milling have become mandatory to deliver the high-strength monolithic restorations dentists and patients rely on for everyday treatment. The labs you’re most familiar with likely have digital capabilities far beyond this, especially as private equity and venture capital have continued to consolidate and homogenize various players in the industry.

So, you might be wondering: If every lab is using some form of digital technology, what makes one lab different from the next? Experience.

Experience simply matters. When a problem arises, does your chosen lab know how to solve it? Can they guarantee great results with your specific clinical protocol, or do they force you to change the way you practice? Do they regularly work with your preferred treatment solution, implant system or restorative material? And, while they may have digital capabilities, are they masters of the technology? A lab’s experience — or lack thereof — will influence every aspect of the service you receive. For the dentist, it’s the difference between guaranteed success or everyday uncertainty.

Keep reading to learn how Glidewell’s unrivaled experience and digital leadership benefits you.

When Jim Glidewell set up his one-man lab at his kitchen table in January 1970, he didn’t have some grand vision of becoming the world’s largest lab. His focus was on offering quality services at price points that were accessible to dentists and patients. That need has only become more critical in recent years, as the costs of running a practice and providing care have risen sharply.¹

Today, five-and-a-half decades since the company’s founding, that purpose is still what drives Glidewell forward, except now nearly 5,000 employees, a world-class R&D department, and a proprietary collection of technologies are what make Glidewell’s progress possible. Through those employees’ collective expertise, through their implementation and mastery of innovations — Glidewell has amassed more laboratory technology experience than any other entity on Earth. The company is using that knowledge and expertise to make dentists’ everyday experience more predictable, economical and efficient.

Where at other labs a technician might be a generalist — crafting a crown, then a bite splint, then an implant case (or answering the phones or even taking out the garbage) — at Glidewell virtually all our 2,000 lab technicians are dedicated specialists with a focused area of expertise.

For example, the Glidewell technicians who digitally design posterior BruxZir^® crowns are only designing posterior BruxZir crowns. They’re completely distinct from the team that designs anterior crowns, and from the team that creates implant crowns, and from the team that creates crown & partial cases, etc.

For our more popular product lines like BruxZir Zirconia, we further segment the staffing across the workflow — with distinct technicians trained for a specific step of the process, such as digital margin-marking, design, pre-coloring or finishing. Meaning at every phase of production, the technician performing the task has an exceptionally deep and practiced level of experience in doing that exact step.

Because of this specialization, the Glidewell technicians working on each phase of your particular case are better prepared for any challenges that may arise. They’re faster, and they’re able to deliver a higher level of quality.

This impact is magnified thanks to Glidewell’s peerless scale, because we’re able to commit this specialization mindset to solutions that are less frequently prescribed at other labs, like full-arch implant prostheses. Where technicians elsewhere might handle a full-arch solution once in a blue moon, at Glidewell we handle thousands each year, which in turn means we can dedicate a workforce to full-arch prostheses and have technicians hands-on with these cases every single day. That level of practice and repetition sharpens their skillsets, making your outcomes even better.

The bottom line of this specialist philosophy is: For the dentist, whatever your preferred clinical protocol or chosen solution, Glidewell technicians simply have more experience working with them. This know-how in turn means greater flexibility and support and better outcomes for you.

Glidewell’s industry intelligence extends beyond our dental technicians. We also have invested heavily in hiring engineering, software and clinical experts who focus on making our services more efficient, more accurate and more predictable. This is not a new trend at Glidewell. From the early 1980s onward, there has been a growing segment of the enterprise that’s specifically dedicated to innovation.

Our R&D group was first started with the goal of verifying the claims made by the suppliers we were working with — if a supplier claimed something was a certain purity or quality, we could double-check and ask for a refund if it fell short. The lessons learned there helped the group transition into developing our own proprietary materials, processes and tools — advancements that also directly benefitted from the know-how of our in-house dental technicians.

This created a powerful feedback loop: R&D could develop ideas, technicians could test them in real-world conditions and provide input, and R&D could quickly iterate. Likewise, technicians could bring challenges or solutions to R&D, who in turn could evaluate and prove them out.

For over 40 years our in-house R&D group has been a core element of what makes Glidewell different. The knowledge they’ve developed shapes virtually every aspect of the enterprise, from products, to processes, to tools and technologies.

In the last two decades, we have especially focused on innovative digital solutions — hiring software developers, computer scientists and other engineers to adapt existing digital technologies for dentistry or otherwise create brand new solutions. These experts similarly benefit from working directly with the lab technicians, again relying on the in-house feedback loop to develop a real-world impact for dentists and patients.

Even prior to Glidewell accepting its first digital impression in 2007, the company was applying computer-controlled technologies to various production workflows to increase precision and repeatability. Our 20-plus years of hands-on experience with these systems has paid countless dividends, completely transforming the dental laboratory. Bunson burners and melted wax have been replaced with computer design stations, layering porcelain has been replaced with millable ceramics, and plaster models have been replaced with micro-CT scanners that capture data straight from elastomeric impressions (and with the majority of dentist’s using intraoral scanners today, Glidewell can skip the conversion phase entirely for most cases). Today’s labs might be hardly recognizable to technicians from even 20 years ago — with facilities now looking NASA-like rather than like something possible in a garage.

Countless of the latest tools, materials and processes were developed first or otherwise improved at Glidewell. We believe so much in their benefits that we’ve shared them throughout the industry, even with competitors, to ensure that premium care is accessible to patients everywhere.

In recent years, our R&D department’s work with artificial intelligence and automation has accelerated the pace of innovation happening at Glidewell and again dramatically shifted our capabilities.

At Glidewell, AI and automation make it possible to harness our experience in completely new ways.

Since the onset of digitization at Glidewell, we have completed tens of millions of individual cases and amassed an unmatched wealth of digital data. Our most seasoned technicians then partnered with our digital experts and staff clinicians to refine this data set and create a proprietary morphology library that represents optimal outcomes, from which all our AI systems are informed.

In effect, Glidewell’s AI is the distilled knowledge and experience of thousands of dental technicians, digital experts and clinicians.

Today, we’re using AI across virtually all stages of production. AI is used to analyze the anatomy of a case, generate crown proposals, manufacture restorations and confirm quality. The outcome for the dentist is the lab experience is more predictable and faster than ever before.

The same insights that educated our AI systems also shaped our automated workflows. Many of our workflows at Glidewell now feature robots, conveyor systems and other automated elements that guarantee repeatability and eliminate the errors caused by human variance. And where variance is required, such as in design, artificial intelligence makes that possible at speed and scale.

Our AI and automation systems also empower clinicians to add services that help them stand out from the competition. With the glidewell.io^™ In-Office Solution, you can bring the lab chairside without having to become a lab technician yourself thanks to its one-click design capabilities. The chairside unit utilizes the same AI and morphology libraries used in the lab, meaning our technicians’ amassed intelligence informs your case. Or, for practitioners who aren’t yet ready to invest in an in-office setup, Glidewell’s AI- and automation-powered Next-Day BruxZir Zirconia makes it possible to scan and deliver a lab-made restoration in as little as 21 hours.

While most labs use digital tools today, no other company can match the depth of Glidewell’s industry experience. Our specialized workforce of thousands of technicians, our R&D department, our proprietary AI and automation technologies are focused on the success of you and your patients. This knowledge was shaped over decades and informed by ongoing relationships with thousands of practitioners across the U.S. Simply put, we’ve seen, done and helped more than any other lab. And with those insights, we can promise you that your experience at Glidewell will be predictable, accessible and friction-free.

REFERENCES

1. Median Practice Expenses per Dentist (Excluding Shareholder Salaries) for Owner General Practitioners in Private Practice, 1990 – 2023. American Dental Association, Health Policy Institute, Survey of Dental Practice.