Case Study: Absolute Dental achieves 50%+ faster surgical-guide design and scalable production with LightningCAD

Custom surgical guides to simplify complex dental surgery

Absolute Dental needed to scale production of its Navigation Synergy™ surgical guides but was hampered by a manual, generic-CAD workflow that required highly skilled technicians and 3–6 hours per design. Working on top of the LightningCAD framework, the vendor LightningCAD provided a custom software solution to simplify complex surgical-guide design, reduce reliance on expert CAD knowledge, and make the process repeatable and accessible.

LightningCAD delivered an iterative, LightningCAD-based system that automated expert constraints, added version control, and produced browser-accessible files ready for 3D printing. The result: technicians now complete designs in 1–3 hours (>50% time savings), less-trained staff produce more than twice the number of designs, human error and overhead fell, capacity expanded, and the surgical-guide line became a foundational, revenue-generating product.

Absolute Dental

John Ballard

Chief Operating Officer