To many, chairside milling appears to be in direct odds with the traditional laboratory model. Who can argue? Every restoration milled in the clinic is one less restoration sent to the lab. And as dentists’ adoption of in-office milling grows, it stands to reason that more lab technicians — perhaps entire labs — will find themselves out of a job.

So why has Glidewell, widely recognized as the largest dental lab in the world, done so much to promote chairside milling? Going so far as to develop and manufacture our own leading chairside unit, the fastmill.io™ In-Office Mill?

In simplest terms, it’s because in-office milling provides advantages for patients. It’s faster, more convenient, and reduces or eliminates the need for temporaries. Dentists who can offer single-visit services benefit from shorter overall chair time, higher case acceptance, and positive word of mouth — giving them a distinct competitive advantage.

A win for your patients is a win for your practice.

Same for the lab. I’ve long believed that, to be successful, you have to look past your own, short-term needs to focus on what’s best for your customer. This often means embracing change. Two of my favorite business axioms are “grow or die” and “be in harmony with your environment.” I’ve used these principles to guide nearly all my company’s choices, and chairside milling is no exception.

To thrive as a company, you simply cannot stop growing. The moment the company stops growing, it enters its own inevitable demise. Your brightest people recognize this and leave — because they know their own value — further accelerating the decline.

 My duty as a business owner is to make sure that growth doesn’t stop, for my customers’ sake, my employees’ sake and my family’s sake. This is why I invest so heavily in research & development. We’re constantly searching for new avenues of business related to our core competency, which is providing affordable, high-quality restorations — by any means.

In business, harmony isn’t a finite state — a place that you reach once and reside for good. Instead, harmony is an ever-moving target because the industry environment is always changing. Continually striving for harmony means adapting and evolving, discovering how to use your strengths to meet your customers’ shifting needs.

Even though chairside milling has been around for decades, dentists and patients alike didn’t gravitate toward it until recently — perhaps because the technology was formerly limited, expensive and difficult to use, or because it wasn’t until recently that our culture’s buying habits have prioritized speed and convenience above all else. What I do know with certainty is that there’s a patient-driven demand for chairside milling. If we at Glidewell don’t answer that demand, someone else will.

No single laboratory has handled more cases than Glidewell. Since the mass implementation of CAD/CAM lab technologies in the early 2000s, we’ve delivered tens of millions of restorations to dentists across the United States, including 35 million units of BruxZir^® Zirconia as of July 2024. We partner with thousands of dentists weekly from all types of practices — solo, group and corporate — and from those relationships, we’ve gained incomparable insight into the needs of today’s practitioner.

Much of this insight is captured in the form of digital data: design characteristics and milling strategies that promote restorative success. This data was the perfect bedrock on which to begin building our own in-office milling system. The result of that effort is the fastmill.io In-Office Mill, the only chairside unit capable of producing fully-sintered BruxZir crowns without the need for an oven.

Because my company is both a laboratory and now an in-office mill producer, we can advise dentists about the best way to pursue a case. We don’t have the same biases as a company that’s singularly focused on just being a lab or just being a mill manufacturer — whether your case benefits most from being made chairside or by the lab, we can assist you.

My organization has grown significantly over the years, in order to better serve an ever-increasing number of dentists. We’ve had to find and hire experts — or become our own — to maintain and advance our research, engineering, technology and manufacturing divisions. Today, I’m proud to employ several hundred individuals in these fields, including two dozen Ph.D.s, nearly 70 mechanical engineers, and nearly 140 software engineers. Their collective efforts make it possible for us to broaden our capabilities and evolve.

When we set out to create the fastmill.io In-Office Mill, we utilized our existing dental lab expertise. No other mill manufacturer has the legacy that Glidewell does when it comes to serving dentists’ restorative needs. We know what it takes to design, mill and deliver excellent crowns & bridges — and we challenged ourselves to replicate the capabilities of our lab systems in a compact, user-friendly, reliable form factor. We challenged ourselves to make a mill that dentists would actually want to incorporate into their offices.

Today, we’re confident that our fastmill.io in-office unit delivers lab-like capabilities. We assemble the hardware by hand in our Southern California facilities from over 300 unique components — roughly 775 pieces in all. It has about the same footprint as a microwave, and is powerful enough to mill a full-contour, fully-sintered zirconia crown in roughly 33 minutes.

In-office milling provides a level of convenience and control that the traditional laboratory can’t compete with. The technology makes one-appointment crowns & bridges possible. What sets the fastmill.io In-Office Mill apart is that our system also provides connectivity — to the lab, to training experts and to the support team. When you adopt our system, you can access us via text, chat, email or phone. The benefit is that we have decades of experience in handling similar cases in the lab, so we can solve any challenge you might have chairside and get you back to providing care quickly. You can rest easy knowing that we’re going to be here to support you for years to come.

In the rare instance a problem arises with the mill that can’t be immediately fixed, you can easily send your case data to the lab. No interruptions or cancelled appointments — your treatment keeps moving forward. You don’t even have to wait for an emergency. Should there ever be a case that’s getting too complicated or something you’d simply prefer not to handle chairside, you’re just a click away from sending it to our experienced lab technicians.

While it may appear to be the downfall of our traditional lab business, we recognize chairside milling to be essential to the future of dentistry. We therefore choose not only to accept it, but champion it. The mere act of selling a mill would hopefully demonstrate that we’re not set in our ways, satisfied to be a dental lab in the traditional sense. But we’ve taken the idea much further, seeing it as an opportunity to vastly improve upon legacy technologies. In all that we do, we’re dedicated to serving dentists and their evolving needs. That is how we demonstrate our value, today and tomorrow. If there is a way for us to meaningfully improve your experience of providing care, you can count on us to work toward making that a reality. And perhaps more importantly, you can rely on us to make it accessible, to help ensure your practice can serve every patient in need.