The Digital Lab of the Future is Automated: How Kreimer Dentallabor Tripled Its Dental Model Production With Formlabs Automation Ecosystem

In 2017, Master Dental Technician Stephan Kreimer joined the family business as the managing director of Kreimer Dentallabor GmbH & Co. KG, a state-of-the-art dental lab based in Warendorf, Germany, about an hour northeast of Dortmund. Since his entry into the family business, Kreimer has focused on advancing digital dentistry and 3D printing to increase the lab’s productivity and streamline its workflow. 

Despite the added efficiency, Kreimer was still affected by the shortage of skilled workers in Germany, and found it difficult to match the increased demand from dental practices for digital cases.  

The solution for Kreimer’s lab is the Formlabs Dental Automation Ecosystem. By integrating Form Auto and Fleet Control into his lab’s workflow, he has tripled his team’s dental model production and expanded the number of dental indications possible.

Adaptability and technological advances have always been top of mind for Stephan Kreimer. Since opening the lab, the Formlabs Dental 3D printers have been an essential part of propelling him ahead of his peers, who, for the most part, still heavily rely on analog workflows.

Kreimer’s team mainly works on digital cases, where 3D printed models of intraoral scans are essential. Compared to a traditional process, this streamlined digital workflow saves time, personnel, and production costs, while preserving the highest precision, accuracy, and reliability. 

The quality of digitally produced appliances made such an impression on Kreimer’s network of dental practices that orders started increasing, and the lab began to struggle to keep up with the demand. Kreimer was unable to match that demand solely by increasing headcount, and he realized he would have to improve the productivity of the processes instead. 

As 3D printers are the focal point of Kreimer’s productions, he realized that the greatest potential for further improvements lay in the reduction of manual interactions with them. The necessity of entering the 3D printing room to manually remove finished parts was taking valuable working time away from his team. 

Automating simple steps like part removal could have outsized impacts on their productivity, and increase the number of cases they could handle each week. “There is a growing need for automation in this process to enhance productivity and minimize the hands-on time required from our employees,” Stephan Kreimer says.

Integrating the Automation Ecosystem into the lab’s existing workflow went smoothly — the Form Auto and Fleet Control are designed as a plug-and-play solution for printer fleets of any size. On the hardware side, Form Auto is easily installed as an add-on to any Form 3+ or Form 3B+ stereolithography (SLA) 3D printer that leverages the Quick Release Technology of the Build Platform 2. 

An extra step that improved oversight and streamlined production was the addition of a tablet that tracked all the print jobs through Dashboard, making it easy for every lab member to quickly check in on the printers’ progress.

Whenever changes regarding working procedures and environment are introduced it is necessary for the whole team to get on board with these changes. But thanks to the seamless integration of the Formlabs Dental Automation Ecosystem into a lab that was already using Formlabs Dental solutions, adapting to it was effortless.

Not only did the transition towards the Automation Ecosystem go smoothly, but most importantly, it has helped Kreimer optimize the daily workflows of the lab.

By integrating the Automation Ecosystem, Stephan Kreimer has been able to tackle the challenge of handling increasing demands without hiring more employees. The team is now printing non-stop with drastically reduced manual interactions, so they have more time to spend on other tasks. Thanks to this rise in productivity his dental lab tripled its output of dental models and is handling more customer jobs per year, which ultimately leads to higher profits.

Adapting to innovations like 3D printing, intraoral scanning, and the recent Formlabs Automation Ecosystem has given Kreimer’s lab a significant competitive advantage. Due to the efficiency of Form Auto, he is planning on acquiring extra units to automate existing printers for additional indications. “If a specific indication exceeds the capacity of a single printer during the week, the addition of another Form Auto will be implemented to automate this indication as well,” Kreimer says.

Moreover, the already automated model production can be optimized even further by leveraging the advantages of the new Resin Pumping System as well as post-processing in large batches with Form Wash L & Form Cure L.

With the addition of the Formlabs Automation Ecosystem, plus the post-processing capacity of Form Wash L and Form Cure L, it’s possible to further streamline workflows, increasing the efficiency of labs and enabling staff to focus on higher-value tasks.