The Nordic Masters of Dentistry

Established in the early 1970s, when computer technology promised to open a new world in industrial design, the company was the first to incorporate microprocessors in its dental units. Since then, this idea has spawned a new age for dental technology equipment and has set the standard for a whole industry for decades to come.

Owing to this fact, one might reduce Planmeca's expertise only to dental units, like the slick and ergonomic Compact i or their flagship product, Sovereign. But over the years the company has also regularly launched a number of sophisticated dental X-ray devices and imaging software onto the market that have become household names not only in dental practices worldwide, but also in rather unlikely places like US military bases. Overall, the Planmeca Group with its six affiliates generates a turnover of €700 million worldwide (according to own estimates), a number that puts them easily on par with other dental industry giants like Sirona Dental Systems or KaVo.

It may seem unusual that all this success happened to be and is still generated from a rather unremarkable site in Herttoniemi, an old industrial district 10 kilometres east of Helsinki’s city centre. There, the company recently completed the expansion of its premises by more than one third to almost 50,000 square metres, an area so large that it could now accommodate more than seven football fields. Besides administrative offices, the new shiny glass façade that reflects the Nordic blue sky on sunny days hides buzzing production facilities and a fully automated warehouse with robotic forklifts on the ground level.

“Planning the building started only in April last year, and despite the extremely rough winter conditions, construction stayed on schedule,” said Heikki Kyöstila, President and owner, looking back on the last 18 months. “With the new production premises, we can respond to the increased demand more effectively.”

The 65-year-old Finn and hobby golfer, who founded Planmeca in 1971 as a small-scale import business and has remained its president and that of its medical device subsidiary Planmed ever since, envisions a bright future for his company, especially in view of the number of new products launched at the International Dental Show in Cologne, Germany, this year. The centrepiece of this recent market initiative is its Digital Perfection Integration concept, which, according to Planmeca, offers a revolutionary means of combining data collected from different 3-D imaging devices to provide dental surgeons with more detailed clinical knowledge in the preoperative phase.

Hardware-wise, dental professionals recently saw the launch of two new versions of Planmeca’s cone-beam volumetric tomography unit ProMax 3D that now provides an extended selection of 3-D volume sizes, ranging from 34 x 42 mm to 16 x 16 cm, and comes with an integrated 3-D face scan unit called ProFace, allowing clinicians to capture a realistic 3-D photo of the patient’s face both in stand-alone mode or in combination with a CBVT scan. According to the Vice-President of Digital Imaging, Helianna Puhlin-Nurminen, the system does not only reduce radiation exposure to patients, but also assures enhanced clinical and aesthetic outcomes.

In addition, intra-oral surface data can now be integrated into dental units with the new Planmeca PlanScan scanner, available as a cart delivery system and with open connectivity, which was designed to allow dentists to capture the complete intra-oral situation of a patient and save it as a 3-D model for immediate design without the need for fabricating a physical model.

All this is brought together in the Romexis software, which has recently been expanded with a stand-alone application for iPhone and iPad devices for clinicians to access and share 2-D and 3-D images via mobile networks worldwide. With the iRomexis application, for the first time dentists have also a free native application with true 3-D surface model rendering in the palm of their hands, the company said.

For Kyöstila, however, this is only the beginning of a new age in dentistry. According to him, it all comes down to his company’s solution-oriented thinking and passion to achieve an perfect workflow for dental surgeries.

“We believe the best way to design cutting-edge products that really meet the needs of our customers is to listen to them closely,” he concluded. “Observing and learning from their workflow helps us to understand the significance of the smallest details that can make a world of difference to the user.”