Crowdsourcing Case Study: Dental Lab Locator

Introduction

This case study explores the use of MetaLocator’s Crowdsourcing solution for the purposes of building a global directory of certified partner dental lab locations. The directory’s purpose is to be used by dentists around the world to find the right lab partner to process dental impressions for patients. 

Customer Profile

The customer is a company that specializes in developing and producing digital scanning systems for dentistry. Specifically, they provide intraoral scanners, which are used to capture 3D images of a patient’s teeth and gums. These scanners allow dentists and orthodontists to create highly accurate digital models of a patient’s mouth, which can then be used to design and manufacture dental restorations, such as crowns, bridges, and clear aligners. The dental company’s scanners are known for their speed, accuracy, and ease of use, and are used by dental professionals all over the world. In addition to its scanning systems, they also offer a range of software solutions to help dental practices manage their patient data and treatment plans.

Project Objective

When dental practices need a lab to create custom dental restorations, such as crowns, bridges, dentures, and orthodontic appliances based on the company’s intraoral scan, they need a quick and easy way to find the right lab partner that is qualified and trained in their solutions.

The dental company had no resource to provide in order to channel dentists to lab partners that provided their products, followed their best practices and used their systems in their service delivery.

The dental company also needed to obtain lab information that was completely accurate and regularly maintained, well beyond what was in their existing databases.  A solution to populate and maintain contact and service information was required.

The solution needed to be robust enough to handle all communication with the lab, including creating an account, populating a detailed profile while handling administrative functions like resetting passwords and making manual adjustments to profiles.  It should also be simple enough to use so it can be supported internally by the dental staff, requiring minimal training and maintenance.

The solution needed multi-country and multi-language capabilities and the capacity to scale well past 100,000 labs and users.  Reporting requirements should support a similar use case, including measuring performance and adoption by country, device profile and more.

Approach & Implementation

MetaLocator worked with the dental company’s staff to determine detailed requirements by following a time-tested Enterprise onboarding process.  Our onboarding process has been refined to a predictable, well-organized program that helped them organize the teams, resources and assets required to succeed.

MetaLocator leveraged the Crowdsourcing product, documentation and our established process to roll-out a successful onboarding program.

The project team selected the Locator product and Crowdsourcing Add-on to meet the requirements.  The Locator, core to MetaLocator’s offering, would deliver the Lab Locator itself while the Crowdsourcing Add-on provided complete coverage for populating the data, maintaining profiles and managing users.  

Crowdsourcing Add-on allows users to claim and manage one or more profiles with content approval and notifications. They can control which fields can be accessed by Crowdsourcing users and approve users with simple, email-based administrative notifications.  The Crowdsourcing form was customized extensively to reflect the company’s branding and data requirements.

The dental company made use of built-in data formatting requirements to ensure a high-level of data quality and consistency.

Incoming edits were staged and approved with simple side-by-side comparison and approval of changes.

For the Lab Locator, MetaLocator recommended use of our Live Search functionality, allowing users to easily view many results at once, supporting the client’s requirement. 

Impact

Starting from an empty database, the dental company now has over 1700 users and 3800 registered labs in their US pilot alone.  They are now planning expansion into new international markets based on their domestic success. 

Conclusion

Locators overlap with many different industries, technologies, processes and standards.  MetaLocator helps organizations of all sizes and industries navigate a successful locator program.  The examples outlined in this case study can be applied to nearly any industry use case.  

The dental company’s lab locator program launch was a complete success as evidenced by the organization’s expansion into new markets.