Dental Labs · Build Pod
Who Builds Software Around Your Lab's Case Flow When 3Shape, Exocad, and a Spreadsheet Already Run It?
Most dental labs we talk to are running on a stack that mostly works: 3Shape or Exocad on the design side, a LMS like Magic Touch or evident, scans landing in a shared inbox, and one person who actually knows which tech is fastest at zirconia crowns versus full-arch. The software gap isn't the design tools — it's the glue. Case-in paperwork gets re-keyed, doctor scan portals each behave differently, and bench scheduling lives in a single Excel file the owner is afraid to touch. A Build Pod plugs into that reality and ships internal tools that match how your lab already moves cases.
What we build for Dental Labs
Auto-route incoming digital scans from doctor portals to the right technician
Pull cases from 3Shape Communicate, iTero, and email attachments, classify by restoration type and material, and assign to the bench queue based on technician skill and current load.
Generate case-in paperwork and Rx parsing from scanned doctor prescriptions
OCR handwritten and PDF Rx forms, extract tooth numbers, shade, material, and due date, and pre-fill your LMS so the front desk stops re-keying every case.
Replace the production scheduling spreadsheet with a live bench planner
Model each technician's throughput by case type, surface bottlenecks before they slip a ship date, and let the owner reassign work without rebuilding the sheet from scratch.
How a Build Pod fits
A Build Pod is a small, dedicated AI engineering team you subscribe to monthly — typically a tech lead, two engineers, and a designer who learn your lab inside out instead of context-switching across ten clients. Week one is on-site or on-screen with your case manager and head technician: we watch a real case move from doctor scan to ship, mark every place a human re-keys data or chases a status, and pick the highest-pain workflow to ship first.
From there we ship in two-to-three week increments against your actual stack — 3Shape, Exocad, your LMS, the doctor portals you already accept scans from. The Pod owns the build, the integration, and the iteration after technicians start using it. You aren't managing a roadmap of tickets; you're reviewing working software on a Friday call and telling us what's wrong.
Frequently asked questions
- Is owning a dental lab profitable enough to justify a Build Pod subscription?
- Lab margins are thin — the National Association of Dental Laboratories pegs typical profit at 5–10% — which is exactly why the Pod focuses on case throughput and rework reduction. We scope the first build around the workflow most likely to pay for the subscription within a few months.
- Do we have to replace 3Shape, Exocad, or our LMS to work with a Build Pod?
- No. The Pod builds around your existing tools, not on top of them. Most of what we ship is integration glue and internal tools that read from and write to the systems your technicians already use.
- How long before our case manager and technicians see something working?
- You'll see a working internal tool inside the first two-to-three weeks, used by at least one person on the floor. We'd rather ship a narrow tool that gets opened daily than a polished platform nobody trusts.
- Who owns the code and the data the Pod builds?
- You do. Code lives in your repo, runs in your cloud or ours under your account, and the case data never leaves environments you control. If you ever stop the subscription, you keep everything.
Ready to ship AI for dental labs?
A Build Pod gets working AI into your stack in 2–3 weeks. Month-to-month, cancel any time.
Talk to a Build Pod