Cloud services development and support is a very significant part of our business. Services are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and can be divided into three major groups:
Cloud data storage
We store in the cloud the details of all orders that lab technicians and dentists deal with.
Order service – Case Management System – is the cornerstone of production that stores the customer’s input materials and information, order details and status, meta-information, as well as all restoration data – from scans and 3D models to the milling programs for a CNC machine.
Manufacturing workflow management
This set of services is responsible for the automatic set-up and management of order queues at each of various production stages, and controls the execution of certain operations at these stages.
The thing about a modern automated factory (a large dental laboratory is just a good example) is that production orders differ very much in terms of type and number of ordered items, materials they must be made of, specific requirements of the customer, and even the inputs. The specifics of the order determine the sequence of the necessary production stages and operations.
On the one hand, the system enables the building and execution of the order state graph, automatically moving it between the queues of the corresponding production stages. The state graph includes transitions corresponding to the execution of technological operations – both automatic and manual, the launch of automatic service programs, workflow and manufacturing error monitoring, product quality control, workflow modifications, etc.
At the same time, the system prepares and stores the information and data necessary for each manufacturing stage, and integrates them.
Cloud Computationally-intensive Services
We do a number of resource-intensive tasks, such as the use of machine learning-based artificial intelligence systems, triangulation of huge arrays of points to create three-dimensional surfaces, calculation of milling paths for each individual restoration on a CNC machine and suchlike.
For many reasons – economic and operational – it is impractical to do such tasks on a local computer. Therefore, we use SaaS cloud computing for them.
A dental technician at a dental laboratory and a dentist in his surgery designing a tooth crown on our CAD system, both receive a ready-made model of the crown from the same cloud service. This service uses deep neural networks to automatically generate crowns based on the specifics of each production order and has sufficient computing resources to do this quickly and efficiently.
Cloud-based implementation of "hungry" computing algos allows quick and flexible scaling of computing resources depending on the current order flow. This maximizes cost effectiveness without compromising the production rate.