News Releases
Strategy Milling Wins WOW Award
Journal of Dental Technology, October 2022
Milling precious metal crowns eliminates common issues from the lost wax casting technique. Sound disc production allows control in manufacturing the alloy, idealizing characteristics such as grain size while minimizing porosity and inclusions. Design files exit the laboratory's digital workflow as stl or lab files and are emailed to Strategy Milling, eliminating the analog or CAD-Cast path for their manufacture. At Strategy, files automatically enter the queue, are nested, calculated, cut, cleaned, inspected, weighed, labeled, and returned to the customer. Files received by noon EST any business day ship the following business day via second day UPS.
In what ways does it save time and money?
Outsourcing eliminates or minimizes the following steps, each having a dollar value:
- Labor/time and associated employee benefits
- Employer-paid taxes
- Consumables
- Alloy inventory
- The necessary but "wasted" cost of sprue system
- Wax printer or mill cost
- Labor for spring, investing, burn-out, casting, divesting, plus the cost associated equipment
- Alloy inventory, miscasts, theft, and refining costs
- Technical errors, delays, customer disappointment
- Soldering or welding warped bridges
- Remakes due to porosity are virtually eliminated
In nine years, Strategy has no record of a milled bridge needing soldering or welding. Cumulative accounting for the dollar value of all items listing exceeds outsourcing costs while increasing fit quality. Additionally, while Strategy manages these restorations, technicians can focus on manufacturing other products, increasing laboratory production.
How are quality and efficiency improved?
Strategy's mills employ customized CAM software providing unmatched part accuracy. After casting parts in the laboratory, a technician typically fits dies into abutments, then inserts the dies into a model base evaluating the overall fit of a frame. Many times in multi-unit frames, there are interferences between preps related to parallelism. In the software at Strategy, these interferences are visible and eliminated through re-machining, leading to a multi-abutment frame seating on dies, most often without any adjustment. Mill quality matters. Strategy invested heavily in precise milling platforms. Globally, no other precious metal milling facility operates five Roeders RXD-5 (5-axis) mills with RCS-1 automation. Reeds mills are heavy. At 8,500 lbs., that stability provides accurate, smooth cutting and minimized vibration while maximizing speed. Roeders mills have no metal-to-metal parts that wear and deplete any axis's precise movement. Maglev and pneumatic technology energize the five-axis motions. High-pressure air automatically cleans the tools after every use. A laser measures length, radius, and diameter before returning the tool to the belt. Those measurements and cumulative cutting time and distance are recorded and compared to standards set in a background software. If a tool exceeds its criteria, the mill puts it away, marks it as used, and never picks it up again. This software vigilance leads to consistency in manufacturing that other milling platforms cannot provide. Across nine years of milling, the external remake rate for Strategy-induced errors stands at <0.5 percent.
What WOW factor differentiates this product/service in the dental lab world?
Strategy Milling provide laboratories access to a world-class metal department, maximizing lean manufacturing principles and minimizing alloy inventory while improving fit and quality one restoration at a time, all while offering the "Gold Standard" in customer service! Strategy Milling's manufacturing process delivers. the finest precious metal milling in the world.