CAD/CAM - international magazine of digital dentistry

34 I I feature _ home story Planmeca president Heikki Kyöstila demonstrating a panel controlling the new automated warehouse. (PhotoscourtesyofPlanmeca,Finland) CAD/CAM 3_2011 _Being a socially responsible company with a clear vision is one thing. Being at the top of the trade for more than 40 years is another. The Finnish dental manufacturer Planmeca is both. Established intheearly1970s,whencomputertechnologyprom- ised to open a new world in industrial design, the company was the first to incorporate micropro- cessors in its dental units. Since then, this idea has spawned a new age for dental technology equip- ment 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 den- tal X-ray devices and imaging software onto the market that have become household names not onlyindentalpracticesworldwide,butalsoinrather 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 hap- pened 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 expan- sionofitspremisesbymorethanonethirdtoalmost 50,000 square metres, an area so large that it could nowaccommodatemorethansevenfootballfields. 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 con- ditions, 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, envisionsabrightfutureforhiscompany,especially in view of the number of new products launched at theInternationalDentalShowinCologne,Germany, this year. The centrepiece of this recent market ini- tiative is its Digital Perfection Integration concept, which, according to Planmeca, offers a revolution- ary means of combining data collected from differ- ent3-Dimagingdevicestoprovidedentalsurgeons with more detailed clinical knowledge in the pre- operative phase. Hardware-wise, dental professionals recently saw the launch of two new versions of Planmeca’s cone-beamvolumetrictomographyunitProMax3D that now provides an extended selection of 3-D volumesizes,rangingfrom34x42mmto16x16cm, The Nordic masters of dentistry Author_Daniel Zimmermann, Germany