A month with... By Ellis Bullement

A MONTH WITH... MY NEW SCANNER

In this new feature we speak to Ellis Bullement - Operations Director at S4S Dental Laboratory. Ellis shares with us a month with their new scanner. Giving us their experience of the newly released Medit T710 Desktop Scanner.

If you’re a Dental Technician / Dentist / Orthodontist and you haven’t yet embraced the digital world in dentistry, you really should consider what you may be missing out on; Files of patients arches in a printable format at your fingertips, backed up and ready to go immediately, the opportunity to send work all over the world, and most importantly not having to ask the dentist for new impressions because of them being lost, dried, or dare I say - poor quality!

Having been early adopters of digital workflows as a dental lab, we have always had our eyes peeled for the next big thing, and we feel we have found that in the new Medit T710 desktop scanner.

We were lucky to give this new piece of equipment a test spin (I believe we were the first people in the UK to even see this scanner, with the exception of Lee Mullins) and have been putting it through its paces in our lab.

At S4S we service in excess of 13,000 dentists in the UK, Europe, and beyond - this number has steadily grown and continues to. We feel this is largely in light of our commitment to advancements in digital workflow. Therefore, getting our hands on a new scanner at the cutting-edge of the industry was a great opportunity for us.

My role in the business is to look after the operations, including work flowing in and out of the lab, so having machinery which does exactly what it says on the tin is crucial to help me plan for workloads / staffing etc. I aim to make the life of the technicians easier by giving them as much administrative support to enable them to make full use of their technical skills. We can scan sets of models in a matter of minutes meaning we have been able to expand our model archiving service to practices looking to digitise their stores and gain back their garages / sheds!

We had just taken on a huge archiving contract for a large group of Orthodontists and we thought this would be a perfect opportunity to put the scanner through its paces. These were for archives only - simple upper and lower models recorded in ICP, which the Medit scanner walks you through really easily, capturing the upper, lower, and finally the MMR. The software that comes with the scanner allows you to easily set up where you want the files stored. This worked well with us, as for this particular archiving task, we wanted to keep a backup to be saved on our server as well as on our online workflow system.

MeditLink is also a platform which allowed dentists to send in intraoral scans for lab work we receive and this platform was very much the same to get used as was that. Simple, logical, customisable. No stress to put it simply.

We also had the opportunity to explore scanning impressions rather than cast models, which is uncharted territory for myself. I was sceptical at first, but the results spoke for themselves. We did control tests and carried out some scans of the impression vs the cast model and printed off the STL’s to then compare the difference and we were very impressed. It certainly does open up doors for us as the necessity to cast impressions before scanning is removed.

When looking at increasing our fleet of scanners, we had spent very little on some scanners in the past, and spent significant amounts on others. Having had a relatively ‘problem-free’ experience with the most expensive scanner, the price point of the Medit scanner did make us wonder if it would be able to compete, but we were pleasantly surprised. Not only did it compete with what we already have, it’s actually faster and will now be our main scanner. Another issue we had with cheaper scanners were STL’s which presented ‘holes’ or gaps (missing data) in the file, which needed to be filled in by a technician in a separate piece of software to salvage the scan. Fortunately, this scanner already has this feature built in, so no messing around fixing files!

The scanning is really straight forward to do, and compared to other machines we have used in the past (bearing in mind we run this machine Mon-Fri, at least 8 hours per day, we weren't ever held up by software or usability issues. The software does lend itself to production-lining to a degree, as you can set the next arch scanning while the database is sorting your file of the previous scan which is great for a lab with as many scans to put through as ourselves.

The scanner currently resides in our digital department; an office with up to 15 staff in (when we aren’t encouraging home-working!) so an obnoxious, noisy scanner would not be very popular! Luckily for us, this scanner blends into the office, and fits in with the aesthetic of a nice clean, white, clinical look.

As with any high-tech piece of kit, the more CPU power it has to play with, the better results you get. We were recommended a spec of a PC to have ready for the scanner prior to its arrival and have had no running issues as a result of lack of juice! We could have spent more on a much faster PC, and I’m confident you could run this on a lesser PC, but we are happy with the recommendation of the support team at Blueprint.

Speaking of which, we want to thank the team at Blueprint and at Medit for their help with setting up the scanner, the minimal amount of guidance they needed to give us to get started. Anyone can run this scanner (myself included!) - its software package is comprehensive and does everything we need in our digital workflow.

Thanks again to the guys over at Blueprint and Medit for letting us get our hands on such a great piece of kit - I’m sure we will get many years of service out of this scanner and assuming our digital department continues to grow on the same trajectory I’m sure we will be looking to get hold of another one in the near future!

Ellis Bullement I Operations Director S4S (UK) Ltd

O’NEIL BUCKNOR, TEAM LEADER, S4S DIGITAL TEAM ALSO ADDED: We now have 7 desktop scanners from 3 different manufacturers in total within the Digital Department at S4S. As it currently stands, we can now mothball 4 or 5 of the older scanners as the workflow is now much quicker and it would make much better sense to scan quicker or less machines. I am sure, if the scanner continues to work as effectively as it has so far, I will be convincing the Directors to buy another T710.

Note from the Editor - Special Thanks go to Blueprint Dental for working with S4S Dental Laboratory and Medit to make this new Magazine feature happen. We would like to take the opportunity to invite other suppliers, manufacturers and laboratories to take part in this feature. Do you have a new material that you would like to share with us, or a new piece of equipment? If you are a manufacturer or supplier, we can help by putting you in touch with Dental Technicians and Laboratories who may be able to participate in product testing and trials. This new feature is a fantastic opportunity to share new things with the Dental Technology family.