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June 9, 2009 | dlpmagazine.com
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Step inside Nobel Biocare’s automated production facility

by Pam Johnson

The NobelProcera scanner offers impression scanning capabiity and these new Gti milling units will be handling the milling of models from digitized data.

Last week I, along with 18 colleagues from the dental press, were hosted by Nobel Biocare to visit their production facility in Mahwah, New Jersey and view first-hand the explosion of new products and materials they introduced this year at the Chicago Midwinter meeting and get a peek at new innovations soon to come.

I’ve been to dozens of these media events but rarely have been so impressed by the effort to open all doors to a process that I had either merely read about in company literature or heard bits about from company executives. The press was given full access to the incredibly automated production facility and allowed hands-on experience with the new NobelProcera optical scan technology and intuitive new CAD design software.
It’s fair to say that Nobel Biocare, a company unusually quiet during the past few years of remarkable CAD/CAM evolution, had not been lying dormant but rather carefully plotting a digital strategy that will have lasting impact for the future. The importance of the event was marked by the arrival of CEO Domenico Scala, who flew in from France to attend the event.

Photo slideshow of the tour

Automated production
As the welcome lectures ended Thursday morning in the large meeting room, a curtain on the stage was dramatically drawn back to reveal a large glass window looking into the Nobel Biocare production facility. We were led into the facility where we were treated to an end-to-end tour, from arrival of scanned cases to quality control and packing and shipping, most all of which was robotically controlled. Conveyor belts moved materials from one production stage to another while robots picked up milling blanks and loaded them into milling units. Robots even packed finished restorations in blister packs and carefully deposited the blister packs into shipping containers. New industrial GTI milling units had been added to the plant to handle model milling production for restorations scanned on the new NobelProcera scanner and new proprietary milling units were being put online to produce restoration with even tighter tolerances. This 24/7 facility handles around 1200 units a day with a total capacity for 5000. Each of Nobel’s four state-of-the-art production plants (Mahwah, NJ; Stockholm, Sweden; Tokyo, Japan; and Quebec, Canada) is outfitted with exactly the same equipment to ensure no interruption of production worldwide.

Hands-on with NobelProcera
Frankly, I have never scanned a model or designed a framework using CAD software so I have no other CAD experience to compare this to. Each of our seats in the conference room was equipped with a NobelProcera scanner and model mounted ready for scanning. After some very simple point-and-click instructions, all of us were given the chance to scan our model, design a zirconia coping, and send it to production for fabrication. In a few minutes we all had accomplished the task and were impressed how intuitive the software was. 

New initiatives
We also were treated to a glimpse of new products coming down the pipeline. According to Hans Geiselhoringer, Global Head of NobelProcera and Guided Surgery, Nobel will be offering milled resin temporaries in the next six months. The examples we saw were highly esthetic and came straight off the milling machine with no need for trimming or polishing. Also in the pipeline are non-precious frameworks and longer-range plans to incorporate full face scanning into CBCT scans and the Nobel Guide implant treatment planning software.